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So having bought the Caterham in October of last year, I had still yet to drive the car. As part of the purchase, I had negotiated that the seller (who runs a Caterham motorsport outfit) to attend a trackway with me to help prepare and set up the car. I booked a trackday at Donny for Friday with MSV trackdays. I can recommend to anyone with a race or sprint car to attend one of these days as they are race car friendly, in fact, most cars were race cars on the day - Mini's, Exiges, BMW's, Clios etc. I had approx 30 hours work on the car over the winter: 1. Trimmed and re-covered the bag seat 2. Perfected the fit of the tonneau 3. Greased the extinguisher lines 4. Replaced all the stickers 5. Painted the interior 6. Fixed the exhaust (which was squashed to say the least - record and re-packed for only £65!) 7. Given the car a blooming' good clean and tidy up I should have been looking to this day but I was bedridden for 3-days earlier in the week. I still felt rough on the day but it was too late to cancel. Nonetheless, the day was dry and bright even if a little breezy. I got up early and trailered the car to the track, only to find one tyre had picked up a puncture on the way. No bother as I swapped the spare at lunch. So how does it compare to the Westie? Well, its hard to compare when I have been off-track for 6-months, but for sure, the chassis is more communicative and the turn-in is much better (it's got a quick rack). Its better on the brakes too, presumably due to the weight saving. The bag seat is not as comfy as the Tillet and the layout of the dash and pedals to too compact initially, until you get used to it. Power is comparable. Overall, I would say an improvement over the Westie, but not by any significant margin. In fact, my best lap time was a 1.21.5. I think there is more to come when I heel and toe (one step at a time I thought) and can use the whole of the track (the grass was so wet a lot of the kerbs had sods of grass on them!) and under the pressure to perform during Quali....but my best time in the Westie at Donny? Yep. A 1.21.5. Funny how these things work out! My first race for the dark side is on the 22nd of April at Pembrey. I'm in a difference class now with the 1.6 so I hope to be competitive. Wish me luck! Mike Pics below inc. some nice historic racers who occupied the garage after I had packed up. Interior shot in my garage at the end

Few more jobs completed.Replaced the old carbon effect front wings with 100% full carbon fibre items from Carbon NV, fabulous quality at sensible prices. Decided on the CSR style wings because the extra moulding lines at the top of the wing provide a slight but noticeable increase in rigidity.Really wanted to save the old wings as I could have sold them on but they were bonded to the brackets and the one thing I can say about Tiger seal is that once its set nothing is coming free too easily.The bracket is mounted to the front suspension by three bolts but cannot be entirely freed from the car unless the wing is removed from the bracket - after a while of attempted and failed efforts to remove the wing from the bracket with no damage being done to the wing I gave up and cut the wing across its width, thus enabling me to remove the bracket / wing from the car and getting good purchase on the wing to break it free.Once separated it was a laborious job to remove all the existing sealant from the bracket, rub down and re-paint (so much more satisfying and so much cheaper than replacing them)Position the new wings was relatively straightforward, couple of key measurements taken to ensure that each side was identical then a single run of Tiger seal on each "leg" of the bracket was enough to hold each wing in position.24 hours to allow the sealant to harden off and then more seal applied to fill in any gaps and job doneOnly downside to the new wings is that they fit so closely that to remove the front wheel now requires the wing bracket to be undone and moved slightly up and across - fortunately access is good and only tales a couple of mins per side BeforeAfterSecond job was to balance the Jenvey throttle bodies, I had a feeling that they were out of balance side to side and despite reading up on the matter I was slightly concerned I might make things worse.Having acquired a synchrometer to measure the pressure it was a case of winding down the main idle bleed screw, measuring across all 8 trumpets and then adjusting each pair in sequence, once equalised the main idle could be adjusted.I may have been lucky but it was not a difficult job and the car responds to the throttle much more sharply and has got the V8 burble it was missing, they were definitely out of balance before and whilst maybe not 100% balanced now they are not far away