Hello and welcome to my blog on turning a rusty old shed into a Italian thoroughbred race car. In the last episode, we saw the big push for the build, completing all of the electrics and engine into a position where it was ready for the mappers. In this episode, we look at the final stages of getting the car ready and taking it Donington for a shakedown

In the last video, we saw the car going off to the mappers and the mapping company was also fabricating the exhaust and inlet manifold tube which took a lot longer than we expected. Halfway through this we decided to take the car to the Auto Italia show at Brooklands museum where the car attractive an awful lot of attention. Auto Italia was a great show with lots of different cars and bits and pieces for all to see.

So once the car was back from the mappers we then got some stickers made up. We went with a classic Martini stripes made famous in the 1980s and early 1990 rally cars. The stickers used on this car is faithful to the 1990 model rather than earlier 80s or later Evo rally stickers which most people put on their car.

We then took the car to Donnington, booked a track day on the National circuit to use as a bit of a shakedown session for a car. I’m was not expecting to go particularly fast but just looking at you know making sure there is no problems, leaks or knocks and not or anything falling off. Learnt a lot about the car and identified the things that we need to work on.

After the shake down we found out we had a gearbox oil leak, the flap on the roof came detached from the secure fixings at the front which meant it just opened up fully. As the day progressed we played around with damper settings, spring rates, right height that kind of thing. We are probably going to go with an anti-roll bar to try and get the car to corner more level than it is.

Unfortunately that’s not the end of the story, as the car came back on the last lap that we noticed that the oil pressure was rather low. Since then we’ve taken the bottom of the engine out and saw in the crank some scoring and the same in the shells. So clearly the oil pressure has got too low at some point and caused damage to the crank.

Despite that we have got some new bits  and order and should be ready for another test at Snetterton on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading, in the next episode we do the final test at Snetterton and then head off to Belgium Spa-Francorchamps for the inaugural race.