Mini Challenge UK - Donnington

[Shaun]

Yes its just a bit cheaper to buy them online. Otherwise you pays your money on the gate when you arrive.

[Shaun]

Just put a thread in the UK confirmed events a I had forgot this is in motorsport and wont get as much airtime.

[King James]

dang, if this was better advertised i would be going tomorrow! have fun those that are going

[obz_210]

I wish I'd known about this earlier. Now got other plans for this weekend but would of loves to have gone. Donny is 5 mins from where I live too

[shilts]

cant wait!!! i love driving through that little tunnel to get infield. by the sounds of things ther are going to be plenty of minis there, although i spoke to gomini mag and they wont be there...we'll just have to send them in a load of pics!!!
if we get as many minis there as possible theyve got to let us on the track!

[minicabrio]

Just off to bed - 6am start for me, hopefully get there shortly after 8ish

[ViscountCharles]

Us too (though I've not managed the whole "early to bed" part).

[Buffster Bird]

Here are a few pictures from today. The racing was very good. Jake Packun won the first race in S class today and Jack Stanford won the second S class race. Not sure who won the club class races today. I think Craig Dawson may have won the second race.

[Buffster Bird]

And a few more.

[minicabrio]

Evening - a great day out, and some top racing to boot

427 photos to sift through, will try and get them up in the next few days

[mister.t]

Cool pics Wish I could get back into a form of motor-racing Need to follow the Challenge more too

Jake Packun

I could swear I used to race him in karts!!! Certainly recognise the name!!

[TimCrighton]

I was out in Sport Maxx instead of the Challenge this weekend just to see how we go on. Its very different on road tyres! We had a quickest lap of the weekend at 1.27.49 in the Sport Maxx, but last time out at Doningtone I ran a 1.22.9 in Challenge spec, with the only difference between the cars being the tyres.

We're going to look at some options to improve the performance of the car within the SportMaxx regulations - you are able to remove more of the interior parts than in the Challenge in order to save weight, and there are various other bits that you can change as well - including a remap and exhaust, plus lots of other bits to save weight, such as alternative road wheels (providing they are OEM - so likely to run R84's as those seem to be the lightest OEM wheel option).

[minicabrio]

Car looked good Tim Have an absoloute ton of pics of you going through the first corner - will hopefully get them uploaded onto Flickr tonight

I really enjoyed the Sport Maxx racing, nice to see some really different cars competing - the white Astra VXR sounded good too

[TimCrighton]

Look forward to seeing some of the pics

We've got a lot to find to get close to the front runners performance wise. The SportMaxx is all done on power to weight ratio, with class A being cars with P/W of between 161 bhp per tonne and 210 bhp per tonne. The problem we've got with the MINI at the moment is that we're coming accross the scales at 1225 kgs in challenge spec, and we've got 210 bhp giving us only 171 bhp per tonne where as the Astra/Megane/BMW are all around 200 bhp per tonne. We can shed some weight from the car, we're looking in to whether we can run the aluminium rear arms from the GP, GP intercooler etc to help the cause, but we're not sure about whether we can do that yet. We're definitely going to look into changing the exhaust system as the current challenge spec exhausts are very heavy, so we'll probably opt to run a single box silencer instead. Obviously we can also loose things like the audio gear, carpets, headlinings, door cards, wet battery etc. We think if we're allowed to run the GP arms we'll be able to make savings of around 30-40kgs, perhaps a little more. The problem with the Supercharged S is that the mapping allows limited gains, and it plays into the hands of the Turbo charged cars like the VXR's and Megane.

I think ultimately we can get there but it'll be interesting! Hence why we're also looking at the option of an R56 instead (possibly even the R56 Challenge Car as the rules only state that you must be able to buy the car from a Main Dealer, which of course you can do with the R56 Challenge!).

Its all good fun We're going to give it another run in September at Thruxton (7th September) to see how we get on with some of the improvements It was nice to be quicker than the other MINI that was out though which was our only direct comparason as its the same spec as ours.

[minicabrio]

Interesting - the new Challenge car is still quite heavy though at around 1150kgs

I'd imagine you'd be better off stripping down your current car, but as you say, it depends what you can get away with I've stuck the date for Thruxton in the diary too, as its local for both of us