Squizz

As part of our preparation for Karen's Formula Woman assessment, we decided to "invest" a sum of cash in some tuition from Tim Harvey. (This is on top of the Club Formula Woman tuition she's already paying for! ).

On Wednesday we went to Oulton Park. The plan was for Tim to tutor karen whilst she drove the S13, with our Impreza on hand as an emergency backup.

"That was the plan..."

So - we snagged ourselves a pit garage and made ourselves comfortable. We had a discussion with Tim about what we wanted from the day and the consensus was that Karen could get stuck into a comfort-zone. "That's fast enough, why try to go faster" kind of thing.

His job was to extend her skill and confidence.

The sessions seem to go well, but Tim was getting frustrated by the S13 as the limits were a bit high and basically it's a bit of a monster. Lots of power delivery but arriving in brutal fashion. For teaching purposes he needed something that was softer handling and would communicate more to Karen, and had more linear power delivery.

So we swapped to the Impreza for a few sessions. :P

Apparently things were much better She was gaining more confidence in her ability, despite the woefully inadequate standard brakes, etc. Tim was more comfortable and things seemed peachy.

Then Tim drove for a couple of laps to show her how it's done!

He proceeded to cause the poor Impreza to Overboost to 16.6psi. They had to come in and I re-set the alarm on our SECS display. It was about lunchtime anyway so we had a break. During lunch I put all our spare fuel into the Impreza and checked the tyres, etc.

After lunch, she drove him out again, but they came straight back in - NO BOOST!

After some fiddling with hoses and clips, re-setting the ECU, etc. I took it for a spat up the road, but to no avail.

We had no choice but to swap back to the S13. (Shame ). Guess what? She was storming around in it and Tim was impressed with her progress. They played like that for the rest of the day until the last hour. The S13 was low on fuel and all our spare had been put into the poorly Impreza!

I had to make a dash in the S13 for some optimax and they went straight back out. The plan was I'd hopefully drive Tim out for the last 20 minutes, but when Karen came in our S13 decided to blow all the coolant out which meant my chances of another drive went up in steam...

Oh well. In the meantime T5NYW had been on the phone and diagnosed that the actuator was stuck open on the Impreza, and a quick fix with the pliers solved that. The S13 was cooled down and re-filled with coolant before our 2 hour drive home.

Tim was an excellent tutor, friendly, and came equipped with two tubes of Jaffa Cakes!!

I've put some piccies below, but I can't post up the in-car video we took which is bloody excellent.

















A shameless plug has to got to all the friends that have helped us with the car: Si, Seth, Myk, Ad, Darren, David, etc. Along with many thanks to Apex Performance! (S13 goodies)

Cheers,
Squizz


BTW - I got to drive about 7 laps in total. Oulton Park is fecking awesome...