Standings

1Tristan CLIFFE175 (186)
2Malcolm SCOTT118
3Anthony BISHOP65
4Antonio IMPIERI64
5Richard PURCELL52
6Graham READ40

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Archive for the ‘News’ Category


I haven’t written much recently, have I. Well, hopefully this will change all that… Since Oulton Park, where I crashed and the cheating Formula Renault was disqualified, we’ve been busy repairing the cars and getting the F304 out to Brands Indy for an MSV F3 Cup round there in the middle of July. There were various problems with the car, ranging from the configuration of the dashboard and datalogger, to suspension settings that weren’t ideal for Tony’s driving style. Whilst Tony was learning the car, we weren’t too worried when he qualified at the back of the grid, and both races were wet which meant he took the safe option of keeping it on the track rather than trying to go as fast as he could. Sadly, there was a technical problem with the car that caused Tony to retire from the race.

Since then, we’ve been through the car, fixed the various issues and softened the suspension. We won’t really know how it goes until Tony drives the car at Silverstone (on the Grand Prix Arena circuit in preparation for the non-championship race there at the end of September) and races at Anglesey on the 10th September.

Meanwhile, my car needed some serious repair work after I hit the wall at over 60mph and decelerated at over 12g. Some new wishbones were made for us by MyRaceSpares.com and we raided our small selection of spares too to get remaining wishbones, pushrods, trackrods and driveshafts. A new front wing was ordered, and new rear wing endplates were made to my specification locally. There was also some bodywork damage that was dealt with by our local carbon expert, and some repainting required which was done in-house. But would the car be any good? Would I have lost my nerve? Would Malcolm Scott be able to capitalise on my misfortune and his resultant victory? Who could tell…

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Last Updated on Friday, 16 September 2011 02:07

Tomorrow morning we depart for Omicron’s first meeting with MSV’s F3 Cup, and Tony Bishop in his Dallara F304. Needless to say it’s quite an exciting time for us, as the F3 cars are in full F3 specification – low ride heights, highly tuned engines, racing fuel and in most cases professional standard dataloggers.

It was the latter that caused most of the recent headaches, as the configuration files for the car were never supplied with the car (although in theory they exist, we just need to find the time to visit Silverstone to get them off the previous owners laptop).  After acquiring a Windows 98 laptop (anything newer isn’t compatible!), and installing the Pi Analysis toolbox, I attempted to get the car talking to the laptop to ensure we can download the data from the weekend.  This worked, but the end of the download process seems to be updating the configuration in the car from the data on the laptop – but I didn’t have a configuration on the laptop. The result was all the variables, conversions, channels and display configurations being lost; yikes. Considering I know virtually nothing about Pi dataloggers, this was quite a conundrum…  But after several hours of tweaking, testing, tracing wires and reading some of the several hundred pages of manuals, I managed to get a dashboard that displayed every channel, got the wheel speed sensor working again (crushed wires), and I hope that means we’ll have data to download.

Fingers crossed.

I tested the car a few weeks ago at Snetterton and found it was capable of setting very competitive lap times. Since then we’ve made a few tweaks to the car and refined some parts of it, so we hope Tony will be able to set some competitive times. Having said that, it’s still going to be a steep learning curve for him and us on how to get the most out of the car over a weekend.  We’re under no illusions that being competitive is going to be easy, but at least we know the car is there or thereabouts already.  We also already know that Tony is a quick driver – his laptimes in Monoposto at Brands Hatch were actually very good – so hopefully it’ll be a ‘simple’ case of getting the two working together as quickly as possible.

Full report to follow after the race, and I’ll do my best to keep Twitter updated throughout the weekend.

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Last Updated on Thursday, 14 July 2011 08:57

Our race weekend began on Friday with some testing. Tony was out all day, usually on old rubber and initially with restricted revs to help run the engine in a bit, and learnt a lot about the car and the track. I went out in the afternoon to find a setup that worked, as I’d never ‘clicked’ with Oulton before. Concentrating on wings and dampers really helped, so my best time was a 1m37.4, considerably faster than Kourosh Khani in the Younes Amiere Formula Renault (prepared for this race by Ross Cunrow) despite then testing without the BARC-spec engine restrictor required in Monoposto. Indeed, I have encouraged them to test with and without the restrictor, and then supply all the data to the club to assist with the equalisation process.

Tony’s day nearly turned for the worse when a fuel rail bracket failed, causing a fairly massive fuel leak. Tony immediately pitted and switched off, and no fire occurred. The manufacturer got a new one to us overnight to fix the car, so everything was okay.

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 5 July 2011 05:24

The second half of the season starts with round 8 at Oulton Park this weekend. Omicron Motorsports will be there in full force as usual.

Oulton is a track that I’ve never gelled with, despite winning here in 2010 – although I was lucky to escape a high speed spin and stall in one piece after intense pressure from a faster Jeremy Timms all race – and so we return with a few ideas to help us. Plus, I have decided to do half a test day to help find a better car setup to assist me on my way.

Tony Bishop’s car has been rebuilt with a fresh engine (we have various dry sumps, camshafts, pistons etc that aren’t legal in Monoposto left over if you want them) and we hope he’ll be back up to speed after several disappointing outings recently. We know he and the car have the speed, but so far we have lacked consistency and reliability. We are obviously working hard to turn that around as quickly as possible!

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 11:44

For the first time since 2008, Monoposto returned to Cadwell Park for the sixth and seventh round of the 2011 championship. Last time we were there, I had a decent lead in the championship over Nick Anstruther and Richard Purcell, and in torrentially wet conditions secured pole position in my Reynard 883, and during the race was ~4 seconds per lap quicker than the rest. However, whilst lapping someone, I put my left wheels onto a river running along the track, lost control, and crashed into the barriers. This brought out the red flags, which awarded my the championship, so it was rather bittersweet.

This time the weather behaved itself mostly, and a good couple of races were had, but the event remained bittersweet in the end.

Our first job was testing. Yet again, I sat out testing from a driving point of view, and concentrated on running my talented team-mate Tony Bishop in his Omicron prepared Dallara F397. He had never visited Cadwell before, so it was important to get some track time to learn the track, scrub in tyres, and find a good setup for the meeting…

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Last Updated on Thursday, 16 June 2011 04:43

I have decided to keep out of the various discussions going on in the world of Monoposto – whether or not Yunous Amiere is the next Michael Schumacher; whether BARC Formula Renault is a championship for career drivers that aren’t good enough to get to Formula 3; whether not liking Lewis Hamilton (because he’s overrated) and Samier makes me a racist; or whether a Formula Renault without a restrictor would be competitive or unbeatable (clearly the latter, all other things being equal).

Instead I want to set the record straight regarding the so called Gentlemen’s Agreement that was discussed in 2009, as it seems to be the source of several misunderstandings by people that were nothing to do with it and by people that claim to have discussed the matter with those involved directly.

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Last Updated on Monday, 16 May 2011 03:53