B’sRACING Ben Bonfield Gurston Down Hillclimb April 2024 OMS 2000m

The hillclimb season has started properly and our first visit of the year was Gurston Down with the 2000m. First things first well done to the organising team for putting on a fantastic event. Thank you to all the marshals who were out in the Baltic conditions. It was great to see so many familiar faces.
The weekend was definitely a challenge with the weather and the car. The Oms coming out after having a new engine in the last couple of weeks. It was definitely a learning experience and a discovery of issues. Sadly Saturday started to show the problems early with the paddle shift cable starting to seize making pulling for gears very difficult and the ecu having a fit, switching off the flat shifter along with causing running issues. Once the ecu had started to work properly it was time to continue to figure out the car, few more issues started to show up with the car developing a misfire on left hand bends (hollow, ashes and the left kink before the finish) which was massively frustrating as it was slowing the acceleration or even slowing the car down when the pedal was on the stop. It was a challenge to judge the brakes as the pedal feels way too soft for me and meant I was locking wheels where I’ve never locked before. We pushed on though both days and made it into the runoff each day with a third on Sunday a great result for a difficult drive.
It was another first this weekend as Gary Anthony Hull took the Jedi out this weekend as his is currently undergoing heart surgery after it went poorly at the end of Loton. Gary really put in some fantastic times qualifying the car both days into the runoff and beating me on the Saturday runoff. Really happy to see how well he got on in the car and started to go quickly early. For me I was massively happy to have two cars with the two engines I’ve built into both run offs (do we go for 3? 😂)
Great weekend even with the challenges, I’ve got a good list of repairs, changes and investigations to go through before Werrington this weekend, I won’t be able to solve them all but we will still be bringing the 2000m, it’s not as quick as the Jedi at the moment but it’s development, learning and I’m having fun.
So here is the footage of the 2nd timed run on Sunday, all a bit scrappy and the gearbox paddle got stuck trying to downchange in the middle of karosel which made for an accidental locking trying to slow it down. You could hear the engine dying as I’ve got my foot buried back on the loud pedal at hollow. I really need to change the sprockets as the gearing wasn’t correct but I came away with a low 33. We ran both the Pirelli and the Michelin with Pirelli being about 0.3 seconds faster. Looking forward to coming back and knocking chunks of time off.
Thanks to Nick Woods for the fantastic photographs.