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Bonus Phillipa Forrester  Jet fire, bloody scary, dangerous thing, just short of a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion). Very relevant to my old BP job on the LPG plant. Took me a while to find it but this is the extract from the devastation caused by the Hickson & Welch jet fire https://www.icheme.org/media/13704/the-fire-at-hickson-and-welch-ltd.pdf The middle portion of the control block no longer exists, and look at the metal fence.

Skodog is mostly behaving and has had quite a few miles added.  Likes: - It’s quite quiet and smooth and civilised. - Stereo is quite good, though I still have to add the Bluetooth box. - 60mpg - Engine is ridiculously punchy for a 1.6. Also, it will hold 75 up Telegraph hill on the A380 two-up and has poke in reserve. That is something Sooty 1 can’t match. Dislikes: -interior finish/materials falls well short of the A6. - HVAC system is a bit crap, especially regarding demisting or lack of. Takes AGES to warm up.  The latter is probably the downside of DI diesel efficiency - the rest…. Not sure if feature or fault. The cabin filter is now new and no much better. - By design the wipers cannot be lifted more than a few mm off the screen before the arms clash with the bonnet. Makes scraping ice more awkward. And now a strange fault. I have long suspected that the traction control doesn’t work. And last night I had to stop in a big hurry which proved that the ABS doesn’t either. At all. And yet the warning lights come on/go out normally on start-up, so one might reasonably assume no fault….. No codes either. Odd! It certainly stops though…

Thank you, Nick!     "The amazing part was the Triumph Vitesse on the front row of the grid although it was being driven by the very talented Philippe Vermast who normally drives a super-rapid Lotus Elan 26R in British HTGT" I've been to Spa - wonderful circuit.    Maybe again this year, especially if M.Vermast is there.  Although I very much doubt if I would be alongside him on the grid! John

Plastic parts have a finite life. Often shorter than what should be the life of the car…. And yeah…. I’m familiar with the “NLA” problem. That’s pretty much everything on a C4 Audi now - in the UK at least. 

Car and driver mentioned here www.wolfitt.com/2025.htm Scroll down to the Spa report in August.

Too right! Had a bit of that Christmas night. Followed by the inevitable attempts to build to maximum height  with only the contents of one Jenga set.

Thanks John, that is the one (and with bonus Philippa Forrester too). Think it was his masters project. As far as I know it was never put into production.

Breaking / Splitting plastic parts is my main pita. Especially with the older cars. Our youngest car is 21. Problem is getting these plastic bastaxxds. For our Suzuki Vitara and the Hyundai Getz „… not longer available“ , sorry sir.    Happy New Year Martin

Happy New Year to you all! The litte grreen beastie has generally been performing fine with little needing doing other than replacing a couple of tyres and yet another wheel trim! MOTs passed with nothing more than a note regarding surface rust on the subframe. They all do that sir! Don't tend to drive it all that much myself so the finer points tend to accumulate. Some low speed hesitancy a few months back was sorted by replacing the plugs. The originals were original, best part of 110k so can't complain. Then I had the car through to Edinburgh a few weeks ago. Quiet but noticeable singing coming from the front drivers side. Especially at speed and once everything had warmed up. My initial assumption was wheel bearing, as there was no noticeable change of sound on lock. Further inspection turned out to be the outer CV joint. New one fitted and new boots on the passenger side as one had a spit and the other didn't look too clever. Most recently I noticed a 'hot oil' smell one still morning after I got back from the velodrome. A hunt under the bonnet identified a split around one of the securing bolts of the plastic rocker cover with plenty of oil in evidence above the exhaust manifold. Bugger. Ebay provided me with a good s/h cover which I finally got round to fitting this morning.  Pretty straightforward job, took less than an hour which was good as there's a bloody cold wind out there this morning. The old cover had split due to corrosion swelling of the spacer sleeve in the bolt hole. Gasket well squashed and past it's best too which won't have helped. Took the opportunity to clean up the face of the head and also cleaned out a bit of oil that had leaked into the plug valley. Job done, and then when I came to clip the bonnet stay back down that the clip that was there when I opened the bonnet wasn't any longer. FFS! So a new one ordered. £4.95. Second one of these things that have needed replacing. Mind you that was almost 10 years ago 

I’ll ask my friend if he’s still got access to the file he made, if he has I’d be happy to share - keep in mind that the bolt holes on the triumph side are for a 2500 tr6 engine and a few of the holes need to be redrilled to fit the 1500 engine I ended up using it on. But it will still work. The engine plate I had made does not have locating dowels for the gearbox and relies on the input shaft in the crank spigot bearing to keep everything concentric. I have heard great things about the rx7 gearbox though I have never driven one myself.  A new flywheel from scratch would certainly make life easier though was definitely not in my budget. Modifying the gt6 one to fit was a fairly simple and cost effective solution, the Mazda friction disc fits happily onto the FW  If you use the Mazda clutch release assy without shortening the bellhousing the input shaft of the gearbox doesn’t reach the flywheel, though if you have provisions to make a custom flywheel a custom input shaft wouldn’t be such a challenge  Clearance for the fork only required some fairly minor fettling, may be worth trying to get it to work? Might save some time and effort.