Well it certainly has been a while, and for good reason, which I will get into.
We pick up from the last update getting ready for my 19th October track day. With a new Bride seat, and the Wilhelm suspension kit installed, I was ready to get back out there and start dropping my time. After threatening to rain for weeks, the morning of the 19th was cool and dry, developing into a warm and dry day. Ideal track conditions for happy engines and grippy tyres. This particular track day was an open pit lane, so my first outing was at around 10am during one of the allocated passenger hours. It was my first time driving my girlfriend around track, and although she was pretty quiet while riding along, she assures me she was terrified the whole time!
The car felt good to drive, and the seat had me absolutely anchored in place, making it much easier to steer. As it was just a warm up session to bring the tyres and brakes up to temp, I left the track with a 1:18, not wanting to push too hard on cold equipment. The next session was about an hour later, and with no passenger and timing active, I was able to push for my first proper hot laps of the day. I managed a 1:16.6, close to my PB of 1:16.3, though I was driving nowhere near my limit. However it was at this point I began to feel the first signs of what would eventually unravel my entire day. The next session was where it all came undone, riding again with a passenger I managed a new PB of 1:16.1, but my clutch began to feel awful. The pedal wasn’t returning by itself, requiring me to pull the pedal up manually as I tried to get the car back to the pits in one piece.
My first thoughts was that I may have boiled the clutch fluid, causing air in the system and hence the sticky pedal. We got to work bleeding and eventually flushing the clutch, making sure the entire line had fresh fluid from front to back. Dropping the car back on the ground, it would still not go into gear properly, nor would the clutch function as expected. Details of this part of the day are a bit hazy trying to remember how it unfolded, but we had about 10 people with all hands on deck trying to diagnose the issue, and hopefully get the little banana car home. The car would move when started in first gear, but was near impossible to shift. By the time the end of the track day rolled around, we made the call to get the car towed home, as any bump-starting/awful shifting would only make things worse, and I wasn’t too keen on replacing a whole E153 if it went really pear shaped.
It was a bummer to end the track day before it had begun, and the tow was far from cheap, but that’s the reality of going to the track. Sometimes it goes wrong, and I was quickly learning to accept that for what it was. Back home and in the hands of a trusted mechanic (I do 90% of my own maintenance/mods, however for a job this large and unexpected I chose to get it done professionally), the car was put on the hoist and the box dropped to figure out exactly what had gone wrong.
Yeaaaaahhh… No amount of fluid bleeding could have fixed this. In a failure I had not seen before, the outside spring seat had broken off, allowing one of the springs to pop out partially and grind/wedge itself against the pressure plate fingers. The pressure plate fingers themselves had been bent/deformed due to the attempt to push them against this dislocated spring. Interestingly, the 3 puck ceramic clutch that was sold with the car was in fact 5 puck, and not ceramic. There’s no bad blood though, this could have easily been some miscommunication between mechanic and owner back before I owned the car. The flywheel was indeed lightened however, and though it was tricky to do, the Toda unit was able to be resurfaced and reused, while a whole clutch kit was sourced from Xtreme. Given I had become accustomed to the way a button clutch performed, and the extra torque headroom it gave me, I went with an Xtreme Stage 2 Ceramic 1B clutch kit. It got all sealed away with another round of Redline MT-90 fluid, and the car was once again on the road. Talk about an expensive day at the track. As the weather was warming up, and my bank account looking a bit grim, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to get back out to the track for a redemption day before the summer heat really kicked in. Not wanting to melt tyres or overheat the 90’s powerplant, I decided to call an unfortunate end to my track activity for the year, waiting for the cooler weather the following autumn.
I still got some cool track photos though! Love seeing pictures of it zipping around, doing what it was made for, no matter how the day turned out.