Fairthorpe Electron race report.

I travelled to Donington on the Easter bank holiday weekend to watch Rob Cobden compete in the first round of the new FISCAR series in his Coventry Climax engined Fairthorpe Electron. As you can read in earlier posts Rob has transformed the car from a wreck that had a tree growing up through it to an immaculate race car. He has not had a chance to do much running on track in the car but it was tested for an article in Autosport Magazine and it was suggested that softer springs may improve the handling. The rear springs were changed and Rob was very pleased with the improvement in cornering following practice but had a couple of niggling problems, the car was blowing quite a bit of oil from the filler cap and was also pushing water out into the overflow tank after 5 laps. Despite the problems and completing only half of the practice session he had done enough to put the car in the middle of the grid and 3rd in class. The oil issue was given a cure after a chat with another driver who was competing in a Lotus Elite with a Climax engine, his engine had a screw on cap which did not provide breathing for the engine, the engines have a couple of breathers elsewhere that do the job sufficiently. So with that information a temperary cure was afforded by putting gaffer tape over the oil filler tube..........voila instant fix!

Rob has an idea that the water problem could be the water being pressurized by not flowing through the rad quick enough causing back pressure and he knew the problem would recur during the race but decided to use it as a test session until he had to retire.

At the start the car got passed by several others but by the end of the first lap Rob had moved up to a very creditable 8th place and second in class and was dicing with much larger engined cars, as predicted he had to pull into the pits at the end of lap 5 and was still holding down 8th when he came in. The car has shown a lot of potential despite so little running and Rob is convinced there is more to come once he has got used to the car which is a very different animal from the Pre war Riley he usually campaigns. The centre picture was taken by Jon Gross and the other two pictures were taken by John Turner, they have kindly allowed me to use them. John is the chairman of FISCAR and would be interested to hear from any other Fairthorpe owners who would like to take part in the series, their website can be found at http://www.fiscar.org/