Car fettling

One of the main reasons I became interested in sprinting was the lack of modifications needed to my car.

The really good news is that, for sprinting, you don't need to install a roll-cage, fire extinguisher, external battery cut-off or undertake any of the many modifications required for circuit racing.

As I understand it so far (despite my continued lack of the mysterious blue book) all I need is:

• A race number on each side of the car
• A timing strut mounted to the front of the car
• A sign in the interior indicating the position of the ignition and how to turn it off
• A clearly marked earth lead in the engine bay

For the race numbers you can simply use tape. This does however make it look like you're heading to Thurrock for a spot of banger racing. As a result, I opted to purchase a set of self-adhesive numbers from Demon Tweeks, who also supplied my helmet & racesuit. For the princely sum of £14.75 you can get a set of six-of-each of numbers 0-9, so these should last me a while (provided I don't draw the number 333 too often).

The timing strut posed a more interesting problem. You can't buy the bloody things, so you have no option but to fettle one for yourself (another test of your resilience and self-reliance!). Fortunately the very lovely South East Lotus Owners Club (SELOC) also organise sprints and include some guidelines for timing-strut production in their TechWiki.

The gist of it is - buy some threaded rod, some nyloc nuts, a length of some sort of cornering material and the tools necessary to cut everything to the appropriate length. I bought the following:

The rules state: "Height of Strut 245mm with a depth of 51mm, the bottom of which must be no less that 180mm from the ground and no more than 200mm from the ground. This strut must then be finished in matt black". Basically, I cut a short length of rod and bolted the plastic cornering to it. The contraption then screws into the towing-eye attachment on the front of the car, so I had to measure it all up to get the height right. The one further complication was that the cornering only had a depth of about 45mm, so I had to cut another length and glue it along one side to achieve the necessary depth. Here's the finished article prior to painting:

I must say that I'm rather proud of my handiwork!

The total cost of materials was about £12. Running costs so far, covering licence, club & race entry, helmet & racesuit and my lovely new timing strut are £584. Fortunately, most of that expenditure is on items that will last me (hopefully) for many years to come!

The other modifications are a piece of cake in comparison. A small sign in the car to indicate the position of the ignition will be knocked up on my PC. Then I just need to wrap some yellow tape around the negative lead on the battery & I'm done.

Oh, by the way, I'm now confirmed as an entrant for the sprint at Curborough on Sunday 17th June. It will be on the short course - you can see a video lap of the circuit here. It's a very short lap, but hopefully will give me a good introduction to the sport. Roll on June 17th!

Getting there...

OK, so having sorted out my club membership & race licence, the next step is to get hold of the necessary safety equipment. Again, because of the non-contact nature of sprinting, the requirements are less than for circuit-racing. The only equipment needed is a fire-proof crash-helmet & a set of flame-resistant overalls.

The beginner's guide reckons that you can get all of the above for about £250, but I certainly struggled. The minimum standard for the crash-helmet is BS6658-85 A/FR (the FR being Fire Resistant). The cheapest of these that I could find was the Sparco Formula for £235. The good news is that the BS rating exempts the helmet from VAT, unlike the more expensive SNELL rated helmets.

On the race-suit front, it is possible to get a "Proban" suit for about £90. Proban is a treatment applied to a cotton suit to make it fire-resistant. I avoided these suits for a few reasons.

• As they are at the budget end of the market they look really pikey - like indoor karting suits (note how this is my primary concern!)
• Proban eventually washes out of the suit so they have quite a short effective life
• If you want to participate in a higher level of motorsport, these suits are often ineligible.

I therefore opted for the slightly more expensive "Nomex" option. Nomex is a fibre that is fire-resistant in its own right, and therefore does not degrade with washing. The nomex suits also have an FIA label which make them eligible for more serious motorsport. So, should I ever get the money together to do some serious racing, both my helmet & race-suit will still be useable.

I bought a Sparco Sprint 6 racesuit for just over £200.

As you can see, just because sprinting is inexpensive motorsport, this doesn't mean that it's not going to cost you a fair bit of money! Still, as I'm sure that the equipment manufacturers would say - you can't put a price on safety. If you were to try, you would say £440 thank you very much...

So that's the licence & equipment sorted. Next steps are to sort out the car.

First Steps

Having decided on sprinting, I had to work put how to get started. Fortunately typing "sprinting nottingham" into Google yielded the Nottingham Sports Car Club.

The NSCC website provided a very helpful guide to getting started, summarised as follows:

1. Join the club (£30) and register for the championship
2. Get the relevant licence from the Motor Sports Association (Non-Race National B - £34)
3. Purchase the necessary safety equipment
4. Make a few minor modifications to your car
5. Fill out an entry form for your first event and send off the fee (about £70 for each event)

So far, I've done steps 1, 2, 5 and a bit of 4.

Number 1 was easy - there's a form on the NSCC website. The only slightly tricky bit was working out what class I would be competing in. A quick read of the championship regulations, plus a squint at the results from the previous rounds revealed that a standard Elise competes in class 2E.

The licence application was a little trickier, mainly due to the slightly random nature of the MSA website, which seems to assume that you already know a lot about motorsport so doesn't really bother to help you. Fortunately the NSCC beginner's guide pointed me in the right direction and I was able to get to the relevant form. Along with your competition licence, you also receive a copy of the hallowed MSA Blue Book which contains all of the technical regulations you need to know about. Sadly, I haven't received mine yet so I'm still in the dark.

I'll cover my next steps in a later installment...

So this is where I've got to so far...

Having spent most of my adult life as a car-obsessed tool, I've always hankered after competing in some kind of motorsport. For years the itch was scratched by karting, but this has petered out over the last couple of years as other commitments have got in the way. I have also been fortunate enough to own, first a Caterham 7 and then a Lotus Elise in which I have thrown myself around various racetracks, non-competitively, on trackdays.

Obviously, being a bloke, the need for competition always rears its head so, having finally finished paying for the Elise, I started to look for ways to compete in it. Not having infinite resources, and Elises being expensive things to fix, I wanted to minimise the chance of smashing my pride-and-joy into tiny pieces. I also wanted to avoid the need for expensive modifications such as a roll-cage etc.

Sprinting seemed the obvious choice. For those of you who don't know, sprinting is an inexpensive form of motorsport, held on racing circuits, special sprint courses, hillclimb tracks or closed public roads. The surface is always tarmac. You are purely ‘on your own’, driving yourself and your car from a standing start to the finish line, timed to the 100th of a second as quick as possible.

Beacuse of the lack of cars on the track simultaneously, you are excused the sort of modifications that can make motorsport so expensive. There is also no-one to crash into, hopefully improving the chance of finishing the day with a car the same shape as the one you started in.

So, sprinting it is. How on earth do I get started then?...

What's all this about then?...

Well, mainly it's a diary of my first real attempts at motorsport. I've decided to try my hand at "sprinting" in 2007. Right now, I know very little about it and what I have read about how to get into it has mainly been confusing. My experience of motorsport / fooling-around-in-a-car so far has consisted of:

• Several years of karting with the very wonderful Club 100
• A number of trackdays in my Caterham 7 and its replacement, a Lotus Elise
• Six trips to the mighty Nuburgring Nordschleife (recorded here).

Along the way, I have picked up a few general motorsport rules:

• The more serious the motorsport, the more time that you spend mostly standing around doing nothing
• The more serious the motorsport, the more of a beaurocratic jungle you have to cut though to get into it. It's like a test - you have to prove that you really want to do it. However the tests have nothing to do with your driving prowess, and a lot to do with your ability to fill in forms
• There's no such thing as cheap motorsport - "cheap" is an entirely relative term...

I'm going to use this blog as a record of my efforts, firstly to understand what I need to do just to have a go and, secondly, to record my "achievements" once I actually start to compete.