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We have a new member in the Essex Area called Bertie the Blat Bear, he has joined to enjoy passenger rides in the Westfields of Essex and would like to meet as many members as possible. Being of the younger generation he likes taking selfies and would like you to help him take lots of pictures of him on his travels. He is also very fussy and refuses to travel in anything other than a Westfield. Once he has travelled around with the Essex members he plans to visit as many members of the other WSCC areas as possible, again only travelling by Westfields. Lets see where he gets to and what kind of photos he takes

I'm busy rebuilding the battery pack with half the battery cells to reduce weight. While this is ongoing I thought I might share my dyno results from last year and talk a bit about electric power verses petrol power. The following graph shows power and torque against road speed. Remember the car has no gearbox. The motor is directly coupled to the diff. You can see that the graph ends at about 80mph. This was due to a software speed limit bug which was fixed before the sprint events. I have added dotted lines to show how the graph should look. Actual top speed is about 110mph. In any event you can see the flat torque curve starting from zero speed and then progressively reducing once the power limit is reached. The power limit of 120KW (from the battery) is reached at 53mph and is constant until just before 110mph. The manufacturers quoted figure for electric cars is usually the battery discharge power. This is easy to measure since it is just battery amps multiplied by battery volts. The Westfield peak battery discharge figure is 120KW or 160bhp. But - the dyno graph shows actual power delivered at the wheels to be 118bhp or 88KW!! Although electric drive trains are more efficient than petrol engines they are still inefficient. Petrol engines achieve about 33% efficiency, by comparison the electric motor and power controller combination are together about 80% efficient. Thus 160bhp x 0.80= 128bhp. Add the differential and tyre inefficiencies and 118bhp at the wheels seems about right. It turns out this is typical for electric vehicles at full power. In general you can take the published electric car 'power' in KW and convert it to bhp at the wheels directly. So a 100KW car is probably putting out about 100bhp at the wheels. Overall, motor efficiency is strongly affected by the motor speed and load and can get up to 95%( ish) under mid range loads and speeds and down to 65% at low speed and high torque. As the graph shows, above 53mph, full power is always available. Conversely, below 53mph power is progressively lower but torque is constant. Thus on short circuits like Curborough max power is seldom reached. The 0-60 time is unimpressive at 7.5 seconds but once up to full power the car really seems to accelerate relentlessly. It's a bit like driving in top gear all the time. Also, unlike most electric road cars, the Westfield accelerates through 80 mph at full power. This makes the car feel much more responsive at high speed than most EVs since these are usually speed limited to about 85mph. The Tesla is an exception to this. It's also worth noting that the Westfield is continuously rated at these power and torque levels. The battery was designed for the 200KW Westfield iRacer and the motor is good for another 47KW with a peak of 167KW. Most 'fast' electric car manufacturers will over drive the motor and battery for short durations to get the rapid acceleration they are known for. Push these cars too hard and the torque output will automatically limit to prevent overheating. It would be interesting to try a Nissan Leaf or a Tesla around a racetrack to test this. I suspect most EVs would start to limit well before the end of a lap - including the Tesla. Since the Westfield Sport E electrical power system is not stressed when raced there appears to be considerable scope to tune this car for higher performance.

Might be a good contest in there somewhere. Total number of different Westfields he travels in / different local areas / fastest track speed he reaches / total distance mailed and driven etc. by the end of year? Each person who drives him kicks in a fiver to the club's charity of the Air Ambulance for a chance to win a club prize like a free renewal? Give it some thought and let me know if I can help.

I wondered where my Ted had gone He disappeared about 55 years ago.

You can do it in stages too if budget, time, or difficulty are an issue. The ECU can be upgrade to one able to run fuel inkection first and just used to run the ignition with the old Weber carbs, leaving the upgrade to throttle bodies till later. Jen

The resemblance to you is remarkable, Pete

Well done Stephen most of us would have been chasing that Ferrari driver around the paddock with a large blunt object but you just fixed the nosecone and got on with it

That could have gone so horribly wrong. ... it made me jump watching it!

Kez, That's a *&%er - I can only assume that although the Westfield alloy upright is described as a "Cortina" upright it probably just refers to the geometry rather than being a faithful copy - the mounting points are therefore probably different to a standard M16 calliper. I have the old alloy rally design mounting blocks for the Midilite to M16 if that'd help - or I can take the dimension of the locating holes but I suspect you'd need to get some mounts machined using the blanks mentioned above http://www.rallydesign.co.uk/index.php?cPath=562_579 Maybe if a few that have the Disco 2 calliper can get a batch done it would bring the costs down? Colin

Best Run 125mph on the banked curve, shame about the rest... Got my gear lever sorted though!

Hi kezman. Yes this is right . I have some from a long time back on my alloy uprights. However if you press rally design they will offer you some alloy blanks you can have machined to fit. I bought some last year for a project that didn't work out. I can send you a photo of my current wilwoods on my alloy hubs if that helps. Alternatives are from hi spec as I have these on the rears too. Cheers jon

How peculiar, I know a few people that had Willwood calipers on Westfield cast aluminium uprights, I don't particularly remember anyone saying they had trouble with the brackets, but then I can't recall just which Willwood Caliper they were using either. Try dropping Andy, he posts under the name Greenstreak, a PM, he had Willwoods on aluminium uprights.

You out that bath yet Cleggy? Get your wrinkly fingers working on some pics and video!

The mightiest of engine with the most soul.....

Tel's Tales 043– 2015 Season- Rockingham 22nd March 2015 Well this was it, the start of the new 2015 season for 12 Westfield guys to clear the cobwebs and prove that their winter mods worked and their driving had not gone rusty over the winter period. It was clear that any New Year's Resolutions in terms of dieting and losing weight (rather than paying for more bhp!) had been long forgotten and last years overalls were still a skin tight fit for some. So there was 1 class A, 4 class B, 1 class C, 3 class D, 2 class F and 1 class G car. Like many drivers I had a very early start at 0415hrs which was the bad news but the good news was that a dry warm day was forecast and that turned out to be a big plus for chasing target times. The most frustrating part of the day was as we approached the circuit nobody could find the entrance as Sat Navs wanted to use non existent roads or take us through a factory gate! At one time there were 7 cars and trailers driving up and down a double carriageway and the roundabouts trying to find the correct route, which we eventually managed after a few swear words about missing road signs etc. After parking up in the paddock and in my case a spare garage, a few of us did the long track walk and looked warily at the concrete outer wall and talked about the possible speed on the outer oval and whether we would dare to keep our foot down all the way round the banked corner. The infield section looked wide but tricky particularly near the end. Scrutineering seemed to take forever and drivers briefings had to be done twice in order to accommodate all 146 competitors. Eventually we all stared a convoy run at about 1000hrs and tried to find where the good/best lines were on track which is not easy at a reduced speed. Martin Harvey was showing off his new bling bits in the form of a coloured Bell helmet and Hans device whist I had to get used to my new Sparco helmet in plain white. Pete Goulding was hoping his diff would not try to shake its bolts free and his halfshafts would be strong enough. Dry track and getting warmer by the minute greeted everyone with a chance to put on a couple of good practices. I was going to have a good personal battle with Pete who had done well last year and I was indeed fastest in P1 with 74.74secs with Pete chasing and second fastest on 79.55secs. Most people were in the low 80 secs bracket and enjoying the track although later in the day a driver did hit the wall hard and wrote off their car with big front end damage. In P2 I had put my new tyres and changed the geometry and expected great things. Pete G showed me how to do it with 76.03secs run with Matin Harvey in class B pushing hard with 81.33 secs. Approaching the start line I noticed somke coming from my dash and jumped out to check what was wrong. One burnt finger later showed that the ignition/starter toggle switch was shorting so that was soon sorted. I then set off like a bat out of hell but got caught out at the end of the start straight and could not take the corner and went straight over the rumble strip and the yellow concrete ramp behind it..........I was lucky that I only bent the offside steering arm and this gave me massive toe out. Back in the paddock and all was fixed in 15 mins and the toe geometry reset and the rear bar stiffened up a bit to counter the understeer I had. Lots of Westfield spectators turned up including John and Jane Loudon, Barry Slingsby and his missus, Keith Adams, Mark Bishop and a few others. Poor Stephen Herbert suffered damaged nosecone when a Ferrari driver reversed into his car while in the paddock!!!!!! Timed runs started after lunch and the weather was great with the track getting warmer by the minute. There were no major incidents that I am aware of apart from John Walters noticing some strange marks on a couple of his ZZR tyres but they were safe to run. T1 and T2 times were very similar for most people and John Williams was happy with his time in class A whilst the close battle in B ended up with Martin Harvey winning on 81.33secs followed by very closely by newcomer Barny Francis with 81.66sec, John Walters 81.84 secs and Lee Smith 82.29secs so all very tight. During a break between T1 and T2 a few of us were chatting and trying to convince Lee not to be a “wuss” and keep it flat through banked oval as he had he bottled it in T1 and in T2 he took the hint and kept his foot down reaching 125mph ! John Williams said his aerodynamics were affected by wind getting trapped in a gap under his scuttle.....I assured him that we all suffered from trapped wind from time to time and I added that to my list of excuses for going slow! Graham Frankland in class C was on his own and record a good 88.00secs on his last run. In class D the battle had raged all day and ended with Steve Everall winning (well done our kid) with an impressive 78.77secs, Stephen Herbert close with 79.95secs and Howard Gaskin on 80.48secs. Pete Goulding in Class F scored a max 102 points with a time of 75.73secs whilst I bagged the quickest Westfield run with a time of 74.31secs. A fantastic start to the season and good points scored in the championship. Terry Everall Speed Series Correspondent Class G competitor

As David has said it's a % applied to the times compared with target times. Tigger and I need to go through it and make sure we have got it exactly right as it's simple in concept, but complex in application.

I thought everyone would like them, we had them about 10 years ago, so felt it was time to bring them out again, but this time in Nomex.

One minute they are, the next they aren't... Can only blame myself as I'm hosting them myself edit: found the problem... I think... please let me know if any images are missing, as it all seems to work fine on my local network (where I am hosting from)

I'm currently wrapping my internal panels, 3M-Di NOC black carbon wrap from eBay, gotta say I'm pleased with the results. Trick is to take your time.