Engine Woes 09/08/09

Full Blue Racing has been plagued with engine troubles, putting the team out of the competition.

Following a trying day on Friday, the team was confident that Saturday would be better and set to work intent on passing noise and brake in time to compete on Sunday. With an engine that refused to start, the team performed a systematic check of the powertrain and electrical system to identify the problem.

Over time it became clear that the ignition coils were at fault and hence the engine was not receiving a big enough spark to ignite the fuel in the cylinders. The team runs an uncommon 'homebrewp' ECU due to budget constraints and requires ignition coils that are not used by many teams.

As always the team was not beaten and whilst a group searched for new coils, 2 other groups investigated opportunities for implementing alternative solutions and attempted to identify the original cause of the problems. Eventually, the problem was identified as a grounding issue in the electrical system, only becoming apparent at the high current levels drawn by the coils. This was fixed and the team were set to try noise with just 10 minutes of scrutineering time remaining.

At this point the absence of our engine tuner came back to haunt us and we were unable to get the engine to run in time to pass these tests. The rules fo FSG have changed this year, meaning that the team is no longer able to pass scrutineering on Sunday - this has unfortunately meant that the team cannot run this weekend. The team is obviously devastated by this news, but is confident that the problem now simply lies in the tuning of the engine and could easily be solved with more time and better engine testing facilities.

So the team now looks forward to next year - today will be spent soaking up the atmosphere, looking for ideas from other teams and of course lending a hand wherever possible.