Kevin J. Jones

Been a long time since I last posted here. I have written a couple of bits over at the Intel site but have rather been neglecting things.

I have somewhat unexpectedly acquired another Westfield as you can see in the pic. The one on the left is the one I built and then upgraded to an 08 Yamaha R1 engine. This ran pretty well last year, I won the sprint/hillclimb class in the Westfield championship although the competition was a little thin sometimes.

That reminds me of a pearl of wisdom that I need to not forget, when making plans always factor in how your competitors might change to counter. Last year at least some of class competitors decided simply not to play after this car proved reliable, which I have to take as at least a minor complement even if it did take some fun out of the season.

The new yellow car has a Suzuki Hayabusa engine with a turbo bolted on. In simple terms its got twice the straight line grunt of the old one which is some engineering achievement. I acquired it from a friend of a friend who was just looking to sell at the time I was wondering what comes next for this year. Conventional wisdom has it that this car should not be competitive, not so much because of turbo lag but because the power is not delivered linearly with the throttle position. The challenge for this year is to tame the beast with some smart thinking and a big dose of new engine management electronics.