2011 Pick Up Truck Racing Calendar

Bloomin typical!

As soon as I publish the calendar it gets changed! The 2nd meeting at Brands Hatch has been dropped and replaced by another round at Donington,  and the dates have been jiggled around a bit. The calendar now looks like this:

26 / 27 March                Brands Hatch                British Trucks

9 / 10 April                    Pembrey                      British Trucks

23 / 24 April                  Donington Park             FIA Trucks

14 / 15 May                   Donington Park             tba

18 / 19 June                  Donington Park             tba

2 July                            Rockingham                 Club

16 / 17 July                   Rockingham                 Club

13 / 14 August               Thruxton                      British Trucks

27 / 28 August               Rockingham                 Club

11 September                Mallory Park                 Club

25 September                Snetterton                    Time Attack

1 / 2 October                 Rockingham                  Club

29 / 30 October              Brands Hatch                British Trucks

 

And for those of you who couldn’t make it to the Autosport show this year, moment of the weekend goes to Anthony Hawkins who discovered one of the down-sides of a removable steering wheel – they can come off if you don’t attach them properly! – resulting in a bent suspension and a liberal amount of bodywork damage for the #98 truck.

Diary of a Race Car Mechanic – Race dates and the Autosport Show

The provisional calendar for the 2011 Pick Up Truck season has finally been released, and it’s going to be a long one compared to last year!

Date                                    Venue                           Also There

26 / 27 March                Brands Hatch                British Trucks

9 / 10 April                    Pembrey                      British Trucks

23 / 24 April                  Donington Park             FIA Trucks

28 / 29 May                   Donington Park             Time Attack

25 / 26 June                  Brands Hatch                Time Attack

2 July                            Rockingham                 Club

16 / 17 July                   Rockingham                 Club

13 / 14 August               Thruxton                      British Trucks

27 / 28 August               Rockingham                 Club

11 September                Mallory Park                 Club

25 September                Snetterton                    Time Attack

1 / 2 October                 Rockingham                  Club

29 / 30 October              Brands Hatch                British Trucks

 

Highlights for me will be Mallory and Snetterton as it will be first visits for me with the race team, although I have marshaled at Snetterton on numerous occasions.  The April Donington meeting I’m both looking forward to and dreading. Looking forward to because as an FIA support it’s good exposure; dreading because as it’s an FIA meeting  it’ll be all making sure the toolboxes are polished and the lorries are lined up dead straight, and all sorts of other nonsense that we shouldn’t have to worry about…

Before all that though, there’s the little matter of the Autosport Internationl show, and a number of appearances for the Pick-ups in the Fifth Gear Live Action Arena. I don’t have full details on this as the team I work with (RMN Motorsport – truck #24) weren’t originally scheduled to take part, but I believe there are between 10 and 12 trucks taking part, with one show on each of the trade / press days, and 5 or 6 shows each on Saturday and Sunday.  Better start polishing me spanners!

Around The World – leg 4

Sion to Bilboa

     I’ve mentioned previously that this journey will have some zig-zag elements and this leg is the first of those, as after flying Eastwards for three legs today see’s a very literal about-turn!

The Route

     The longest leg so far. 490nm south west across Switzerland and France, and then along the northern coast of Spain to Bilboa. Cruising altituded was 18,000 ft, which is pretty close to the Electra’s ceiling, but of more concern to me was the flight time. Average ground speed so far has been around the 110mph mark depending on wind conditions, which meant a five hour plus flight. Fortunately unlike real life pilots, I have a pause button and I’m not afraid to use it!

The Flight

     The first, and biggest problem was getting out of the valley where the airfield was. I was taking off on a northerly heading, which was a bit of a pian as it was exactly the opposite direction I wanted to go in. The valley seems pretty long and I can’t see why I couldn’t have climbed all the way to cruising altitude before turning, but instead I was instructed to turn to intercept the course as I was at around 5000ft. You can see from the picture just how close the hills were. In hindsight I would have much preferred to have got to around 8500ft before starting the turn.

     Once I was clear of the moutains, the flight became almost routine and I settled down for the long haul to the Spanish coast. Although the cruising altitude on the flight plan was 18,000ft my initial clearance was to 14,000ft and as I wasn’t going to hit any more mountains after leaving Switzerland I decided to stay there. On these shorter flights fuel useage isn’t an issue and I’m primarily doing this for sight seeing so it doesn’t seem to make sense to fly any higher tham I have to.

     The scenery was nothing spectacular though, and it was a bit of a relief when the coastline came into site and I started receiving vectors for the approach, although I wish the software designers had found a way to stop atc assigning an ILS approach to an aircraft that doesn’t have an ILS system… I was however glad for once that I had the GPS receiver on board. The airfield was on a plane a few miles inland and in stock flight simulator form is pretty featureless. I was well into the final approach before the runwaybecame visible. Unlike the landing in Sion at least I had the room to set up an approach though, although I could still do with more practice: missing the first taxi-way meant the aircraft following me in had to go around. Oops!

 

The Next Leg

     is another 490 mile run, all the way across Spain and into Portugal. Groan!

Around The World – leg 3

Marseille to Sion

After an enforced lay-off due to some problems that meant I had to remove and re-install flight simulator, I’m finally back in the air. And I couldn’t have picked a better leg for blowing the cobwebs off of my *cough* flying skills…

The Route: 

      225nm north-east from France into the Swiss Alps. What isn’t obvious with the map zoomed this far out is the fact that Sion airport is in the middle of a valley surrounded by mountain peaks, which makes the approach a little bit challenging. More on that later though.

     Cruising altitude was 15,000 feet, and as normal I had to reduce the default fuel load.

Into the mountains.

     The take-off from runway 32R and the climb to cruise altitude were both uneventful, although I was mildly amused by the fact that with no wind I was directed to use a runway with water at the end of it…

     Following on from my recent grumbles about the lack of proper simulation of the aircraft, I did some more experimenting during the long climb out and discovered that in fact the mixture and prop controls possibly do have some effect, but it’s not reflected on the engine gauges. I’m sticking with the Electra for the time being, but I think if I was starting from scratch again I’d maybe switch to the FS Baron 58 to try and add more realism.

     As I had been messing around the scenery had got gradually more hilly and the mountains soon began to appear, and as they got closer I started to suspect that they were going to cause more problems than I had anticipated. According to the map the airfield I was heading for was at approx 1500 ft, so using the 3:1 rule I was looking to start descending with around 45 miles to go. But, as 40, 30, then 25 miles passed I was still at 11,000 feet and had considered going back to 12 to avoid the highest peaks.

Definitely getting hilly

Looking again at the map I decided to move off course and head towards the head of the valley that the runway was in, the plan being to then descend as quickly as possible before levelling off and slowing down. The first part of the plan worked but as I descended  into the valley I realised that slowing down was going to be an issue. So far I’ve been using a landing speed of around 80-90mph, but as I levelled out I was still doing 130, and the width of the valley meant that weaving to slow down would be dodgy, and flying a pattern was completely out of the question. I settled for dropping the landing gear and flaps and hoping for the best.  luckily it worked and after all the effort it took to get to the runway the actual landing was completely unspectacular. The scary thing is that this landing was in clear weather, with no wind, and in an aicraft with a relatively low landing speed. I wouldn’t fancy doing it in say a Learjet with poor visibility and a crosswind…

Runway in sight

The Next Leg.

     I mentioned back in the intro that the route does have a zig-zag element to it, and the next leg see’s the start of that as after 3 flights heading eastwards, the next will be south-west back towards Spain

So did Teflonso and Ferrari do anything wrong?

Here we go again…

Ho hum,

another Grand Prix, another controversy. I have to say firstly that I didn’t see the race itself but I’ve seen the highlights of the incident in question. For my money there are two things to consider here: the behaviour of the team and driver(s), and the role of team orders in F1 in general.

My view of what happened:

     The question is: was Felipe Massa given a coded instruction to move aside and let Fernando Alonso take the win? The answer I think is yes. Not because of what was said, but because of how it was said.

     The message from Massa’s race engineer was delivered in almost the same way you would speak to a naught child: FERNANDO IS FASTER THAN YOU. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?. That’s not the way a race engineer and driver communicate normally. Normally you’d get ‘Fernando is catching you up’, or ‘Alonso is x seconds a lap quicker’. Then once Alonso had passed there was the message about ‘try to keep up’, followed by ‘Sorry’. Sorry for what exactly? Sorry because you’ve failed to produce a car quick enough to give your driver a win? Or sorry because you know that your driver is having a perfectly legitimate potential race win taken away from him by the people that pay his wages?

Previous History

     Of course if you’re part of the ‘Alonso / Ferrari are evil and deserve to be punished’ brigade, you’ve got plenty of ammunition to further your cause. Ferrari have plenty of previous history when it comes to favouring one driver over another. Even if it was legal back then, the way they made no effort to hide it was what annoyed a lot of people. And when they have been criticised their defence has usually been along the lines of  ‘We are Ferrari and therefore we can do what we like’.  And of course Mr Alonso is hardly whiter than white… The problem is that teams have always employed orders, but there are a million ways of doing it without it being obvious. Take the Maclarens earlier this year; after trying to copy the Red Bulls by taking each other out the team suggested to Jensen Button that he should take it easy as his fuel was getting low. Sounds reasonable enough and the driver has to take it at face value as the only people who definitely knew how much fuel he had were the engineers that had access to the telemetry. Or of course there’s always the old favourite of a ‘gearbox’ issue or a fluffed pit stop. Everyone else can do it and at least fans can convinced themselves it was a coincidence. Ferrari though always have to go for the poor sod being overtaken practically waving the other driver through.

So will they get punished:

     Well so far they’ve been fined $100,000 dollars and referred to the Motor Sports Council. That in itself will give the conspiracy theorists a field day as the meeting will be in Italy prior to the Italian GP, and will be chaired by a former sporting director of Ferrari. You couldn’t make it up really.

     Personally I’d like to see some sort of points deduction as that is the only thing that will hit Ferrari where it hurts, but I have a suspicion it won’t happen. Massa is now claiming that he made the decision himself to let Alonso past, so unless something can be found to contradict that, a warning will probably be the best the MSC can do.

Around The World – leg 2

Orly to Marseille

 

The Route:

     340nm south-east across France to the coast, with an estimated flying time of just over two hours. The cruising altitude again was 13,000 feet, and again the aircraft had been fuelled so it was half full. This was way too much; I could have completed the flight purely with the wing tanks, but as I’m going to have to use the centre tank eventually I decided to take the opportunity to experiment. I loaded double the estimated amount of fuel required and split it between all three tanks. This still only represented about a third of the planes total fuel capacity, and other than adding a few mph to the take off speed didn’t seem to affect the handling at all.

The Journey

     The first job was to taxi to the end of runway 6, and as I did I was reminded that although I’m in a historical aircraft, replicating a historical journey, Flight simulator is still rooted very much in the modern age. As I headed towards the hold line I started to hear a strange whining sound. At first I thought it was the PC fan, but afer a few minutes I realised it was coming from the speakers. A quick check of the views revealed the culprit; an MD-80 tail-gating (tail planing?) me down the taxi way. Fortunately it eventually gave me some room, allowing me to take off unhindered.

     The climb to cruising height and the turn onto my heading were both fairly uneventful. Unlike the first leg ATC seemed happy to let me stay at 13,000 feet. The scenery was picturesque although mainly rural with no cities along the route, so after a while I took the opportunity to mess around with the auto pilot. Whether it is genuine or not I don’t know, but the aircraft is equipped with an autopilot system similar to the FS DC-3, allowing heading and pitch-angle settings. As most of the navigation is GPS based there is also a retrofitted panel allowing the autopilot to be slaved to the GPS. I actually don’t like flying GA aircraft with an autopilot, so I spent some time switching between them as the French countryside rolled by underneath. As I got closer to the coast there was a noticeably change in the colours of the ground; green being replaced by brown and then yellow as the fields were replaced by scrub.

     During the flight I had been travelling constantly south-east, so I was expecting a straight-in approach to Marseille. Instead I was instructed to vector for runway 32L, giving some excellent sight-seeing opportunities as I flew over the coastline before turning 180 degrees to head in towards the airport. Once on the ground it was a relatively short taxi past the terminal to the parking area, and the chance to crack open a virtual beer and have a stretch.

Leg Three

     see’s a slight change of direction as the route turns north east and heads into the Swiss Alps. Better make sure I pack a scarf!

Around The World – Leg 1

Farnborough to Orly

     The first leg of the journey started at Farnborough in Hampshire, and ended at Orly airport near Paris. There was nothing particularly interesting on the route so I’m going to reflect a bit on the aircraft and the software package in general.  I shall apologise in advance as unless you’re a flight simmer or a pilot yourself, most of this might not mean a great deal.

The Route

     Was a fairly simple, 250nm run with a near straight run over the channel and into France, followed by a couple of turns to take me to the airport.  The cruising altitude was 13,000 ft. By default the aircraft was loaded with a 50% fuel load which was a touch excessive, so I emptied the centre tank!

The Journey

The cockpit. I shall be seeing this view a lot!

     The trip started with the aircraft sat on the tarmac at Farnborough. All the controls were already configured, and firing the engines was a simple case of pressing the buttons marked ‘start’! Checking through the controls it became clear that the aircraft has been modelled as simply as possible as far as the controls are concerned. The prop condition levers don’t appear to do anything (although I can live with that), and more annoyingly neither the COM or NAV radios are adjustable from the cockpit, meaning I shall have to rely on the GPS and maps for navigation.

     Controls aside, the plane handles reasonably well. On the way to runway 6 it trundled along quite happily at 10mph on idle and turned very easily without needing any differential braking. The take-off was a little bit more interesting as it pulled heavily to the left, needing a good bootfull of rudder to straighten up. Given it is a twin engine craft torque-steer wasn’t something I was expecting, so I can only assume it was a balance problem.

     Climbing out and turning to head south towards the coast was fairly uneventful. Roll and pitch are both fairly responsive, although any turn over 10 degrees of bank seems to need full rudder, but that could just be my control settings. The real suprise of the climb-out was when air traffic control told me to climb to 21,000 feet. Suprising because not only was the altitude on the flight plan 13,000 feet, but the stats for the aircraft give its maximum operating altitude as 20,000 feet! Needless to say I stayed at 13,000…

Over France

     Approaching the coast of France I started to encounter a 20 knot crosswind which then became a tailwind as I turned eastwards to head to Orly, and this gave Flight Simulator another opportunity to display(I thought) the idiocy of its ATC system. As the wind was westerly, I would have expected a landing on either runway 24 or 26 but no, I’m given a straight-in approach on runway 6. In a tailwind? In a taildragger; a craft that is going to want to lift the tail as soon as I hit the brakes? Riiiight.  As it turned out the wind died away as I descended, but as I couldn’t tune the radios I had no way of getting the weather reports to know that.  This meant that the landing was fairly uneventful by my standards, although again the plane pulled to the left whilst slowing down, so maybe it is a balance problem. It’ll be interesting to see if it happens on the next flight, which is:

Leg 2

     The trip through France continues with a flight south to Marseille. I’m hoping to do that tomorrow so I can have the report up over the weekend.

I’m off on a round-the-world trip!

Well, almost… 

     I’ve always had a bit of fascination with flying, and in recent years one of my more nerdy hobbies has been home-pc flight simulation, specifically the Microsft Flight Simultor series. There are a ridiculous number of third-party add-on’s these days, and a while back I picked up one titled ‘Around the world in eighty flights’. The title should be  fairly self explanatory! As a way of keeping me motivated I thought it would be fun to do a blog of the journey.

The Plan

     According to the blurb on the box, the journey is split into 80 segments, covering 43,000 miles and flying over 60 countries. The more knowledgeable of you may be wondering about the distance as it doesn’t match either the traditional route for round-the-world trips, or the distance around the equator. The developers have instead gone for a bit of a zig-zag route to maximise the sight seeing opportunities, so the route includes a full north to south traverse of Africa, and goes as far north as Greenland and as far south as Darwin in Australia. The estimated time to complete the journey is some 400  hours, and if that seems excessive, here is the reason why:

The Plane

     It is possible to use any aircraft within Flight Simulator for the flights, but to add a bit of history the package includes its own one, and here it is:

Lockheed Electa 10E

Beautiful, isn’t it? A mid-1930′s Lockheed Electra Model 10; an all-aluminium aircraft powered by two Pratt and Whitney radial engines. Although it’s not specifically stated, if you removed the paint job this would be a dead ringer for the plane flown by Amelia Earhart on her round-the-world attempt. Like Earhart’s craft the passenger / cargo section has been replaced with an extra fuel tank, vastly increasing the craft’s range.  For the purposes of this journey the plane has been retrofitted with a GPS system that can be connected to the autopilot. I shall be ignorong that where possible as I like to fly ‘hands on’ without an autopilot.

The first trip:

     is a short cross-channel hop from Farnborough to Orly airport in France. I’ve already completed it so the report should be up fairly shortly.

Will Portsmouth FC be the first club to win the FA cup and then go out of business?

Maybe I’m being a bit evil, but although I feel sorry for the clubs employees and fans, part of me really wants to see the club go down the tube in the hope that it will serve as a wake-up call  to the corporate merry go round that football appears to have become.

There are two things that really irritate me about the whole administration thing. The first is that prior to going into administration the club management seemed to have this arrogant assumption that despite the horrendous debts and the almost certain prospect of relegation, because they were a Premier League club somebody would come in to buy them. The other is that during the hearing into the HMRC’s winding up petition, the judge who heard it said something along the lines of she had no doubt that the club was trading whilst insolvent. I have to wonder if they would have got away with administration had they been a couple of divisions down…

Having said that, I still think things are not looking good. Given the amount of time that the club have been in administration, I would have thought that if a buyer was going to come in they would have done so by now, and I can’t see them surviving through the summer  when they will need to find money to pay the wages but won’t have 20,000 people coming through the turnstiles once a week. Chances are that there wouldn’t be much left to buy as it is. The backroom staff has already been cut, and we now have the daft situation where the squad is being chosen on the basis of whether appearance bonuses have to be paid! It could only happen in sport…

My advice to any Pompey fans is enjoy the cup final, because it may well be the club’s swansong.

Browser choice. Why?

 

Anyone else had this as part of their Windows update? After ignoring the shortcut on my desktop for the last week I finally decided to have a look at it. I wish I hadn’t bothered.

I have two problems with it. The first is that I’d heard people complain that the notification when it first comes up looks like a piece of malware. I have to say I agree, although I don’t really blame Microsoft for that one. If I was forced to embed something advertising competitors alternatives in one of our products I think I’d make it look as dodgy as possible as well. In motorsport we call that meeting the letter of the rules but not the spirit of the rules!

The second issue I have is it just seems a completely pointless exercise. I understand all the arguements about giving people choice and I think they’re rubbish. I suspect that the majority of home PC users won’t really care what browser they’re using as long as it works, and anyone who does know about computers will probably install another browser at the first opportunity anyway. I don’t see why it’s necessary to ‘force’ people to make a choice.  Then there’s the fact that in order to install a browser in the first place you either need an installation disc, or you need to download it. Oh hang on, you need a browser pre-installed to do that…

The funniest part is that if the EU had done their homework properly they’d know that the code for IE is interlinked with various other parts of Windows anyway, so you can’t actually remove it totally. You can however choose not to use it, something I’m sure most people could manage without a nanny-state popup being stuck on their monitor.

George Orwell would be proud…