My sister, Paula, who is 90% blind after a terrible domestic accident said she wanted to come along to experience a road trip again with her "big" brother. The last one we did together was the Le Mans 2004 trip in the BRG Excel SE.
In addition through Northloop I had been given a set of Blue EBC pads for the Elan to test out on the road and trackdays. When I received them I went down to the garage I use in Newbury, Sterling, and borrowed one of their ramps to change the pads over. I had a bit of difficulty getting the bolts on the rear calipers to come loose! The pads that were in there had only been fitted about 11 months before?
I had to enlist Sterling's help to get them loosened - involving a huge breaker bar and a lot of strength.......................
I then bedded the pads in over a few days on the road - gradually building up to full braking as advised by EBC.
The pads are really good for the road as initial bite comes in early and does not require a lot of heat to be effective - so the blues are ideal for road use.
The night before I was to set off on the trip to Spa - Neil sent me an email saying there had been a big mix up with the booking and 7 people turned up instead of 5. So no room at the Inn for
Martin and Paula, but he would organise something else locally and not to worry................
So on the Monday morning I went early and got the trailer and loaded the Elan and we set off for Dover. Well - a combination of traffic, roadworks, accidents etc meant we missed our ferry. doh!
So 2 hours added to the journey already.
Paula wanted some cigarettes and some for our Mum so I said lets stop at Adinkerke which is the best and cheapest place for ciggies. I plugged it into the sat nav and when we landed at Dunkirk off we went. Or we would have done had there not been roadworks and a "deviation" which took us all round the houses........anyway this added another hour or so to the journey.
However, this was not the end of our delays - Belgium has "found" a load of money to fix their roads and subsequently there are roadworks everywhere. This added more time to our journey
- so much so that we did not arrive at our alternative hotel until 1030pm.
However, the hotel was in darkness and the doors were all locked and no phone numbers on the noticeboard. To cut a long boring story short - we phoned Neil - he came over - found s Privee phone number - the owner got out of bed and let us into our room.
The next morning we headed off to the track with a little trepidation as the previous day the fog had not lifted until 12 and then the Marshalls had lunch until 1300. The morning was glorious with blue skies and sunshine. So no issues there :-)
Found Spa with no issues and unloaded the Elan and went to sign on and attend the briefing. It was Daren's 40th so we all sang Happy birthday to him before he started the briefing.
Roof down, helmets on and all strapped in we set off for the sighting laps. Arghhh, some people had got it all wrong and were overtaking the tailenders on the sighting laps only to find a "snake" of relatively slow moving traffic........................fortunately no major issues - just some red faces :-)
Did a dozen or so laps in the morning and then a fine drizzel started, not good, track very greasy and slippy - no likey :-(
Fortunately it was 12 and time to stop for lunch - lets hope the rain drys up over lunch.
The EBC Blue pads were superb - Spa is a very demanding circuit and speeds are high and the
brakes and pads take some high speed punishment. The blues did not protest or fade once in the morning - they were just excellent - filling you with confidence to brake later and later. Increasing the enjoyment of the day with every lap.
I have upgraded the Elan's front brakes to Wilwood 4 pots with 320mm disks and it is a good system. I had been pleased with the previous Wilwood pads apart from the excessive dust created under braking.
The Blues are a step up from the Wilwoods and do not create as much dust - let us see what the afternoon will bring.
After lunch we went out with the wet weather tyres and wheels on, but it quickly became apparent that a very dry line was forming..........yippee :-) Rushed back into the pits and put the track tyres and wheels back on and zoomed back out onto the circuit.
The tyres heated up really quickly and the pace picked up really quickly - I had also got to know
the circuit better and understood my lines and turn in points. I was really enjoying this so after
about 7 laps I went back into the pits to see if my sister wanted to come out for a few "hot" laps - she did so off out we went again.
A picture tells a thousand words - I had the smile surgically removed the next day..............
You can just see the EBC Pads sticker on the front bumper.
Here is the car going up Eau Rouge at speed - you can see the EBC sticker clearly in this one.
I did another 10 laps and then Paula wanted a rest so we came back into the pits.
However, I was buzzing and was soon back out on track enjoying myself. The pads did not fade once and just kept braking consistently all day - from the start to the finish. I only came in as it was near the end of the day and I was running on fumes :-)
Here is a link to a friends Vimeo page where you can see the elan in action at Spa being followed by a classic Lotus - A Sunbeam!
EBC - the pads are fantastic and there is loads of meat still left in the pads. I will definitely buy another set of these and will be recommending them on the Lotus Elan Central website -where I will post a link to my blog.
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