The day had come at last to give the car it's first run. It was an early start having loaded the car on the trailer on the night before. It was a wet drive to Silverstone which did not fill me with confidence. It was a Lotus on Track organised day on the full GP circuit and we arrived 30 mins. before the driver's briefing giving me chance to unload the car and get set up in the garage. Andy Napier got there earlier and saved me a space in the garage. Good lad!
Took the day off on the friday to get the last few little jobs done and check everything over (again!). The main job was to pipe-up the fire extinguisher. I didn't need it for the track day as road car regs apply but I wanted it working... just in case!
First the extinguisher cradle had to be bolted down. The only place for it is in the passenger footwell. 4 x 6mm holes with the air drill and it was fixed in place. I had already wired up the internal and external pushbuttons and fixed the control box when I carried out the work re-wiring the dash panel. So all that I had to do when I was ready was plug the connector into the extinguisher firing control unit when I was ready. The lifeline system comes with all the hose fittings that are needed. The regs. require 2 nozzles in the cabin and 2 to 4 in the engine bay pointing at the bits that burn i.e. the fuel and the oil systems. I didn't want lots of plumbing around the clam as this meant I would have to disconnect it whenever I wanted to remove the clam. So I went for 2 nozzles mounted in the bulkhead behind the seats, one pointing down each side of the engine. Once these were bolted up, it was then the tricky task of cutting and bending the plastic coated aluminium tube so that the two bulkhead nozzles could be tee'd together and a single tube shaped to go from the bulkhead pax side along the floor near the pax sill, across the floor in front of the pax seat and then into the push fitting tee of the extinguisher firing unit. The other end of the tee connects the two nozzles that I had set up facing up into the driver and passenger sides from the centre tunnel. These really needed a proper support bracket to fix them but were fixed temporarily for the track day using duck tape as the job had taken a lot longer than I had thought. Another job for another day.
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