MG Car Club of South Australia
SANDOWN . THE HOME OF
HORSE - POWER
I
SANDOWN PARK RACEWAY
travelled with Rodney Gibb to the
Sandown Park Raceway over the
week end of May 22/23 where Rodney was competing in his MGTF Cup
Car with MG Racing in the second
round of the Victorian State Circuit
Racing Championships race meeting,
with the Victorian MG Club officiating
at the meeting.
We left Burton at 4.00am Thursday
morning and arrived at Sandown at
3.30pm in time to unload the car and
Timing “finger”
Pick-up
tools etc; and check-in to our motel. Offending grub screw on the bottom
Adrian Akhurst had also arrived on
Thursday in his big Ford Louisville car Rodney’s MGTF suffered a strange
transporter with 4 cars on board, one failure on the Friday during practice,
of which was his black MGZT V8 race the engine would run but was missing
car.
badly, fuel and spark were there so a
Friday was a hive of activity in the pits call to Peter Coleman of Triumph
with most of the 210 entered cars and Rover Spares suggested checking the
crews busy with documentation and crank timing sensor, now unlike norpreparation for untimed practice, with mal MGF/TF engines the Cup car enmost of the 25 MG's and Invited Brit- gine has a cam timing sensor atish cars parked in garages allocated tached to the end of the exhaust cam
to the club, the MG grid includes other so while cranking the engine slowly
there was the culprit, a small grub
British classic cars, Triumphs etc;
screw on the rotating component had
Saturday was qualifying followed by worked out and was triggering the
one 10 lap race, Sunday was an 8 lap sensor before the proper trigger point
in the morning and a 10 lap race in resulting with the ECU getting some
the afternoon. A relatively new MG to strange inputs, screwing the grub
the grid was Phil Chester’s 5.6 litre screw in with a dab of Loctite fixed the
Rover V8 powered MGBGT, a truly problem, the car never missed a beat
impressive vehicle, I understand Phil from then on.
had purchased the car from Peter
Bennett in Sydney, while there are a Phil's V8 was fitted with a ‘H’ Pattern
number of racing V8's in the club only 5 speed gearbox and Saturday afterPhil and Adrian’s were entered on the noon lost a couple of gears so his mechanics jacked up the car, removed
weekend.
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