Preparations for Silverstone

The first race of the season is only a few weeks away and things are starting to get a little tense here at Richard Lander Racing! Our new gear hubs have arrived, thanks to the immense generosity of the guys at Fallbrook, and have been fitted and the datalogging system is pretty much complete also. there should even be time for a quick test session over at RAF Portreath after the Easter holiday just to bed everything in and get the drivers a few more hours behind the wheel.

The Season Opener is on 1st May and will be the first Greenpower event to be held at Silverstone. With the Corporate challenge being held on the same day it will be a great weekend of racing. Entry for spectators is free so feel free to make your own way up or join us in convoy on Saturday morning. We will be leaving from school at 9:00 and camping at Silverstone on the Saturday night. Make sure you bring an inflatable or camp bed as Silverstone doesn't have the best camping facilities!

The schedule for race day is then as follows:

• 0730 - Teams sign in
• 0815 - Scrutineering
• 0845 - Team briefing 1
• 0930 to 1030 - Practice
• 1040 - Team briefing 2
• 1110 to 1230 - Season Opener Race
• 1330 to 1730 - Corporate Challenge Race
• 1800 - Awards ceremonies

 We look forward to seeing plenty of our supporters there and hopefully we can come away with something for our trophy cabinet. For more information and to book space for camping feel free to contact myself at dpascoe@richardlander.cornwall.sch.uk or contact Greenpower direct by going to their website by clicking HERE.

Good, then bad, then AWESOME!

The Good - It's been a busy week at Richard Lander Racing. We have finished work on the electrics, the bodywork, the datalogger, the steering and we have even built a rolling road type test rig. With all this complete we got the car up and running on the rig with all the cowlings removed. This however exposed a major problem...

The Bad - as Mr Arney was inspecting the drive chain during testing he suddenly noticed he was getting splattered by some sort of fluid. This turned out to be the transmission fluid from the NuVinci hub. Turns out we may have been spinning it too fast and fluid has been escaping from the seals. The fluid turns out to a custom component and therefore irreplaceable. It was looking like we were about to take a massive financial hit...

The AWESOME - Mr Lloyd-King got to it and made contact with Fallbrook in the USA, the manufacturers of the NuVinci hubs, and told them about our problem hoping they would give us some advice on how to repair it. Their response totally blew us away, they were so interested in the whole project that they are sending us out not one but two replacements! America really is the home of customer service. Thanks to this amazing level of generosity we will be back on the road with minimal downtime. For those who want to know more about Fallbrook and the great piece of engineering that is the NuVinci hub click HERE.

Epic Update

Well, so much has happened since the last post that I am not sure where to start! First of all we have a new sponsor to thank, Teagle Machinery of Blackwater have very kindly agreed to machine our drive shafts for us and have also volunteered to sort out the bearings for them too for which we are very grateful.

We also had several deliveries over the past couple of weeks, we are now the proud owners of a new motor and race batteries. At the same time the Nu Vinci gearbox arrived, a purchase made possible by the generous funding provided by Ladds of Redruth, a big thank you to them.

 
And finally perhaps the most dramatic piece of news; a major leap taken just before the half term, with the bulkheads finally complete the chassis could be glued together with the bone glue. It was all hands on deck for this with everyone pitching in to get the bone glue on before it cooled and then clamped into the jig.

 

  

 

New Sponsor

 

I would like to offer a warm welcome and a big thank you to our newest sponsors, Ladds from Redruth. They have agreed to provide us with a massive amount of funding, so we will can now definitely afford all the components we wanted, including that NuVinci CVT hub we had our eyes on!