Min Comp Musings

Well, the MINCOMP/MINI MANIA Mini ran at the national races held at Willow Springs Raceway over the memorial day weekend where it was severely hot. Not the hottest it has been, but still damn hot. I am quite pleased with the way the car ran. I went faster than I ever had on a lap to lap basis, despite modifications to the track (better paving and widening). Estimates put those track mods at plus two seconds a lap on the old track, and that was about the improvement in my times. Put into this equation the fact that I was running three year old rock hard tyres, a new light is shed on the subject - oh yeah, plus a pretty serious oil leak dumping on my tyres adding to the interest. The bottom line is that the car is working quite well - unlike this time last year when I was having a horrible time with it's handling.
The oil leak had become a real annoyance to me,as it has been with me all year, regardless of the motor that was being used. It doesn't leak on the dyno, in the shop, or in the pits. only on the track, causing a real messy aggravation. Some investigation, and previous experience, has shown the cause to be cracked crank gears from the tooth belt cam drive system. The gears are cracking along the root of the keyway slot,causing the seal rubbing surface to cut the seal ,causing oil to leak out on right hand turns. In two years,1 have had nine of these develop this crack anywhere from several races to immediately, with no real pattern. I have checked to make sure that the gear is butting up against the crank journal wall and not binding up on the radius there, and also that it is not due to over-torquing of the damper bolt. It may be an effect of harmonic vibrations, maybe not. I have heard of a couple of others have suffered the same problem over here, so I mentioned it to Keith Dodd of Mini Spares who says that no one over there has reported the same problem, an  they sell a good
many of these kits. Most of us run solid mounted engines, they don't as a rule in England (about time they did!!KC),so maybe the harmonics thing is relevant. After some consideration and listening to my suggestions for a solution, he says he will look into it and maybe produce an updated item - at least for competition use.
Also an update on the TRAN-X diffs I have used and talked about over the past couple of years. If you remember I like them a lot. I won't go into the why's - I already did that before. Here I would just like to report that during my last qualifying session I broke a CV joint. In the past with the old style plate diff, it was 'hang on for dear life, slow down, and under no circumstances make any abrupt throttle changes'. Or in other words go from lap times of 1 :36 to times of 2:00 minutes. With the TRAN-X diff, I felt a slight tug on the steering wheel
coming out of turn nine, another tug going into turn one just as a corner-worker held up my CV boot - trying to bring to my attention that it would be a good idea to bring the car in before it broke. Well, it was already broken and the incredible thing was that the lap before the first tug I did a lap time of 1 :34.8 and the following two laps after the tug were 1:36.4 and 1 :36.6 - less than TWO SECONDS slower with one wheel drive!! If someone had told me this story, I would have not believed a word of it - but I have lived it and have witnesses to prove it..... LONG LIVE TRAN-X LSD'S !!!!!!!!!!!!
BILL GILCREASE.