Rotary Hillclimb Racing

Getting ready for 2011 Hillclimb season in the rotary hillclimb racing car.

The rotary hillclimb racing car need to be re-freshed to get ready for the 2011 hillclimb season.  During the 2010 Noosa Historic hillclimb in November the engine suffered over heating problems after that event the engine developed a knocking sound in the front rotor. Curious to see what had happened, during the Christmas break I stripped the engine down to see what the problem was. The front rotor bearing had spun inside the front rotor damaging the crankshaft and the rotor. This was not good news as I would have to replace the crank and the rotor.

Fortunately I had a spare engine and that I stripped and cleaned then I gave it to Ben Hunt at Rotary Motorsport for him to rebuild. The rebuild consisted of Ben’s own porting, internal dowelling and internal rotor modification all hoping to make the engine more reliable. Ben also suggested that I fit an external oil cooler to help with the cooling of the engine.

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Supporting the 2010 Gold Coast Show in the rotary hillclimb racing car.

We had a phone call from the Gold Coast Show organizers a few weeks ago, asking if we would like to have our Rotary Hillclimb Racing Car on display.

Each year at the show there is an exhibition of all forms of motorsport, the idea behind the exhibition is to promote road safety by showing people all different forms of motorsport, and how easy it is to compete in motorsport. This hopefully will make people join car clubs and take illegal street racing off the roads and onto race tracks where it belongs.

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Making Wet weather Tyres out of old Slicks.

After running this new car for over 1 year and running a hillclimbs in the wet with full slicks, I thought that I would try to reduce the risk of rain at up-coming Hillclimbs by making a full set of wet weather grooved slicks. Hopefully just like when ironically after you have washed your car that it rains, I hope that when I actually have wet tyres that it will reduce the possibility of rain.

To do this I looked at different designs of the grooved wet weather tyres that are currently being used in motorsport. After much consideration I designed my own profile to cut grooves.

Firstly I marked-out the design that it wanted onto the front tyres with white marker pen. (more…)

The next event for the Rotary Hillclimb Racing Car is the Mt Cootha Classic May 29th & 30th 2010 at Mt Cootha – Brisbane.

Last week I was asked to help the Historic Racing Car Club to promote the 2010 Mt Cootha Classic Hillclimb, by having the Rotary Hillclimb Racing Car available for a photo shoot at the Mt Cootha Hillclimb track.

In total there were 3 Hillclimb cars, 2 motorbikes and 1 side car set up ready for a photo shoot for the Courier Mail newspaper.  We had to arrange the vehicles in such a way that when the photos were taken the Brisbane City was in the background.

The 2 photos below shows some back ground going’s on when we were setting up for the official photographer.  The 2 photo’s below were taken by Kevin John the Yamaha R1 motor-bike in the photos is Kevin’s pride and joy, Kevin will be running the R1 at this Hillclimb as well as the other 170 cars.

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I hope that everyone has had a safe and happy Christmas and new year.

It is hard to believe that another year has come and gone, and the hillclimbing over the past 2009 season has had some highlights and a few lowlights but overall the first year of hillclimbing for the new rotary hillclimb racing car RPV02 has been a great. With the last run of the year breaking the sub 40 second bracket at Mt Cotton. It has taken me of over 11 years of driving an open wheeler to get this result.

Above is a photo of the medallion and the plaque that I received from the MG Car Club for breaking the sub 40 second barrier, you can see the names of the other members of this exclusive club.

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We have been running the new rotary hillclimb racing car for a few months now and during this time the car has performed very well with only a few issues.

Most of the Hillclimb’s have been run in coolers temperature but now as our Queensland summer temperatures are getting hotter the car has been running hotter and forcing out radiator fluid into the catch tank when running at higher temperatures at longer events. I think that the reason that this is happening is that when the Formula Ford Van dieman was designed it did not have a front wing. Now that I have fitted the front and rear wings the air flow around the car has been changed and the radiators are not getting clean air to allow the radiators to cool the engine. To fix this issue I have decided to fit 2 small cooling fans one on each radiator.

The photo above is the new Davies Craig 8” cooling fan ready to be fitted to the car. (more…)

We have been running the new rotary hillclimb racing car for 4 months now and during this time the car has performed very well with only a few small teething problems.

It is competitive but the braking system has not been very consistent, and it is hard to drive the car to the max when I do not have confidence in the brakes.  The front brakes keep locking with the bias all the way to the rear, so we have changed the size of the rear master cylinder to 5/8” from 3/4” to get more rear bias but the front wheels keep locking under hard braking.

Front Brakes locking up

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Now that the car is complete and the engine is running I needed to get the engine dyno-tuned and then get the wings setup and mounted to the car.

Wings to be mounted

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So far I have most of the major parts of this project complete like the chassis finished and painted, suspension designed, machined and ready for installation, so the only major component that needs to be done is the engine.
I needed to strip the dummy Mazda 13B rotary engine and re-build the engine so that it is ready to be assemble to the gearbox and then fit the engine and gearbox with all the accessories back into the chassis.
The photos show the engine as the assembly takes place, the front rotor and housing is assembled, the water O rings are installed. Note the port shape on the rear primary inlet port, this is my own shape we will see how it goes later.

Engine Assembly Front Rotor

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The next step toward finishing off the rotary hillclimb racing car was paint the chassis and then to wire in the ECU and then to plumb up the cooling system and the pipe work for the intercooler as well as finishing off the manifolds and exhaust system etc. The photo shows the finished painted chassis.

Painted Chassis

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