LM3000—Back On The Road

Sunday 19th March was the date for the opening round of the 2000 Open Sports Car championship at Donington..

Since an engine failure towards the end of last year, a lot of work had been done on the Loxwood's LM3000. A new engine and new suspension system had been fitted and a lot of work done on weight reduction with the use of titanium.

With a test session booked at Donington for the Friday before the race, the brand new extra wide tilting trailer was pulled out of Loxwood's yard on Thursday morning to load up the LM and spares, driver Alan Rennie taking the opportunity to use the trailer to demolish a small section of wall, that he said he didn't really want!.

Friday's test session was made up of 4 one hour periods. In attendance with us were Dave Harris of DFH Engineering who looks after a number of LMs and Patrick Murphy of Quantum Dampers whose products were fitted to the LM.

The first track session was set for 10.00. However after the car was fired up, there was a slight grinding noise from the gearbox. There was no alternative but to strip the gears out of the Hewland box and try to see what the problem was. After changing the gears the noise was still there, so it was a case of having to live with it and hope that nothing expensive broke.

The next text started at 12.00. There were three or four LMs out, several Radicals a gaggle of TVRs and the works Lister Storm. Alan set off in the Loxwoods LM and was putting in times in the mid 1m 12s, around a second off the pace we were looking for. After 20 laps Alan came into the pits to make some suspension changes—they didn't work as he threw the car into a gravel trap a couple of laps later. With the session stopped, the car was towed back to the paddock. It took us an hour to get all the gravel out of the car!!

Some major changes were made to the car's set up prior to the 3rd test session which was due to start at 14.00.

After 10 laps the car was breaking into the 1m 11s when Alan got a clear run at the track so we called him into check the car over. As we worked our way around the car it soon became obvious that more smoke than usual was coming from the brake assembly.

Removing the body, we found that the brake cooling duct was on fire.

Not a very big one, but still a real fire.—At last some excitement. In a fashion more akin to rallying the offending unit was unceremoniously ripped from the car and doused in water. After a quick tidy up of that corner of the car, the LM was sent out again with an adjustment to the ride height to see if the times could be improved.

The final session was to be at 16.00 and again a lot of adjustments were made to the car, concentrating mainly on the front end, the damper settings particularly. This time the session was uneventful. Alan managed to hit 1m 10s a couple of times but was usually in the mid 1m 11s which he felt would be too slow for the race itself.

Rather than return to Sussex on Friday night we elected to stay near the circuit, and spend Saturday at DFH Engineering in Coventry making some modifications to the front dampers to try and increase the rebound. It was a good job we did.

Running a close check on the rear end of the car we found that one of the suspension links to the gearbox had pulled out of its thread. Some time was spent making the repair before we could get to work taking apart the front suspension to make some modifications and put the whole thing back together as close as we could to the original settings.

Race day for us commenced at 09.40 with official qualifying, a 20 minute session. Despite having the car only approximately set up Alan managed to put the car in 4th place. The race itself was not until 17.00 so there was a lot of hanging about, but also quite a lot to do. Alan was to-ing and fro-ing amongst the various garages talking set ups to various drivers and would on occasion return to us and request a change to this or that. After checking the timing system and that the data logging equipment was working OK, there was little to do except sort out the fuel. Having emptied the tank we sat down to calculate the fuel requirement for the race. Based on the test sessions the car was using 1.3 litres per lap. Now the race is 30 minutes plus 1 lap. Based on lap times of 1m 12s that meant a probable total of 26 laps at 1.3 litres per lap. A total requirement of 34 litres. To allow for the warm up lap we settled for a total of 40 litres, then bottled out completely and put in 45 litres. As it happened we were right to err on the side of caution. As the cars approached the start line on their warm up lap heading for their rolling start the red lights stayed on adding one lap to the probable total.

Second time round and the race was on, Alan however got everything wrong and ended up very quickly in 7th place.

For the next 15 minutes Chris Lord and Mick Millard fought it out at the front, while Alan set about clawing his way back up the field. It took him several laps to get past a couple of LMs and he then got stuck for a while behind one the Yamaha powered Radicals. He finally got past this and was now in fourth place.

Several cars had already visited the pits and it was becoming obvious that if the car kept going a top three position was not out of the question.

With just 10 minutes to go the Loxwoods LM did not appear out of the chicane as expected and the safety car came onto the circuit. Alan had been knocked off the circuit by one of the other LMs that had already been lapped!

So that was that. Chris Lord went on to win the race and we stood around waiting for the car to be towed in. Although it was disappointing not to finish studying the lap times showed that the car was not that far off the pace—indeed Alan's fastest lap was the second fastest of the race.