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Welcome to Dallara398.com

Welcome!  We compete in the UK’s Monoposto Championship, which is intended to allow older single seater race cars to be used by ordinary people with sensible budgets. In 2007 we began our single seater racing career with a 1998 Reynard 883 Formula 3 car, and learnt very quickly that it’s not easy to be competitive. Championship wins followed in 2008 (Reynard), 2010 and 2011 (Dallara F398), and our next challenge awaits.

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1Tristan CLIFFE175 (186)
2Malcolm SCOTT118
3Anthony BISHOP65
4Antonio IMPIERI64
5Richard PURCELL52
6Graham READ40
7Steve PATANIA34
8Tony COTTON34

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Tony Bishop, Dallara F397

Silverstone Arena GP – Non-Championship Meeting

Monday, 10 October 2011

It was a relatively easy build up to this event, the second non-championship meeting of the year, as Tony was the only Omicron driver in his Dallara F397.  Along with a few tweaks to the setup of the car we also changed brake pad material to help him get more confidence on the brakes.

Qualifying, however, was a bit of a disaster. After spending a few laps bedding in the brakes, he started the lean on the car more and more, but a red flag meant that his rhythm was broken. At the restart of the session he was trying immediately, and set a lap time that was good enough for 9th on the grid.  The next lap was even better, and it was looking like he’d improve considerably, but a loose wire on the fuel tank stopped the fuel pump and he coasted to a halt.  That left him 42nd for the second race!! Had the wire not come loose (actually, it was receeding pins in the connector – what are the chances!!), I think he’d have been 7th on the grid for race 1 and probably around 9th in race 2… such is motorsport!

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Anglesey Backdrop

Anglesey International – Round 11/12, September 2011

Wednesday, 14 September 2011

The penultimate meeting of the year was at Anglesey, on the International configuration rather than the usual Coastal circuit we have used in the past. The weather was very windy all weekend, which made predicting the tyres required very difficult, and had an impact on the driving of the car.

The week leading up to this race was quite stressful and difficult – first of all our Race Truck developed a fault on the way to a test session at Silverstone that wasn’t fixed in time, and Tony Bishop, our other driver, had to pull out of the meeting due to personal reasons at the very last minute. We had already loaded up the van and trailer to take both of Tony’s cars to the circuit, but we needed it to take my own car, so there was some hasty unloading and reloading to do on the Thursday.

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winner2

Brands Hatch GP – Round 9/10, August 2011

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

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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Omicron at F3 Cup

MSV F3 Cup, Brands Hatch Indy – Preview

Thursday, 14 July 2011

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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Oulton Park – Round 8, July 2011

Sunday, 3 July 2011

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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Oulton Park Map

Oulton Park preview

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

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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