The Pan Delta Super Racing Festival is an annual event consisting of six races hosted in Zhuhai, China. After the F1 it is one of the largest race events in Mainland China and most race weekends there are between 20,000-30,000 spectators and with the racing going out live a potential 15+ million TV viewers. It's a great event that includes Formula Renault, Superbikes, Circuit Hero (Roadsports) and guest races. Last weekend we had Formula Masters and the Lamborghini Super Trofeo out as well which was pretty cool.
I've really struggled with my gearbox all year combined with performance gains my competition had made had put me in 4th for Class C (Sub 2.0l) going into the last weekend. Behind another Atom, Motorsport Elise and Honda FD2 but only just, 6 points separated 1st to 4th.
The week before the race I had a replacement engine fitted, I was lucky enough to be introduced to one of the race teams that came 2nd in China Touring Car race at Macau last year who were selling a blueprinted Group N spec FD2 engine so that was quickly bought, imported and fitted. In the only testing session the week before we could see it was running too rich and needed mapping so I arranged for my tuner to get across to Zhuhai and do it on the Wednesday before the race. Nothing is easy in China and everything needs importing including a chassis dynamic expert from the UK who we flew over in the Summer and my tuner who is Singapore based normally.
So we got the car on the dyno and starting the mapping on Wednesday. Disaster soon struck, the tuner down shifted without the clutch twice thankfully not under full load but enough.....
That was a thousand dollar ACT clutch, note the was it certainly broke. Thankfully nothing else seemed too. So on Thursday my car was scrutineered sans clutch whilst I raced around HK looking for something.
Thankfully I found a local dealer with a Racing spec Ogura Racing Clutch, it cost more than my first three cars but it was perfect:
One sexy flywheel:
So within hours the engine was out, split, clutch fitted then back in again. Ready for practice Friday morning.
I get out quite quickly in practice and on my second lap did 1:47.7 some 2.3 seconds than my best lap time ever, result things were looking good. Then on the back straight the bolt holding the steering road arm snapped at 185kph, I thought I had bought the farm when the wheel worked it's way around the wishbones and only the wheel arch stopped it from coming over completely.
The car was brought back to the pits on the low loader and looked a bit sorry for itself:
We got it stripped quickly and started searching for parts. We managed to get both the upper and lower wishbones then went off to the local machine shop for a new control arm. Purely metal fatigue had done the old one. I'll be replacing all four corners before the 2015 race season. Obviously I missed qualifying.......
Race 1 went well got a great start from dead last and ended up 5th overall by turn 1. After some very very close racing with the other Atom I did end up winning the race. First time ever so I was delighted. We did have some very close wheel to wheel racing, literally we did clip each other once and I got called up in front of the stewards for direction changes. Oops trying a bit too hard but the crowd loved it. Trying to get the TV footage as it will be very good.
Race 2 went much better and I won again, winner the championship for class C as well.
Over the moon. Anyway some pictures:
Team write up for race 2: http://www.tracktorque.com/en/news/12/201409/127.html
Team write up for race 1: http://www.tracktorque.com/en/news/12/201409/126.html
Video of race 2: http://youtu.be/kYY-mkMJdC8
What a start.....!! What a story too......You dont give up easy do you! Like it. 
