Gavin Watson

Gavin Watson 2011

Brands Hatch Touring Car Greats

April 9th 2011

Gavin is trying to get as much power out of his Isabella as possible and over the winter fitted a new camshaft that gave an extra few BHP's.

This was tested on the first race of the season at the Brands Hatch in the Touring Car Greats on April 9th.

Qualifying in 18 place in a field of 31 and 2nd in class. In the race 16th place overall 3rd in class with a starting grid of 30 cars

Although power was up torque was down and for Brands tight turns this was not ideal but, she finished the race without problems. After the race Isabella decided to ingested a nut that indirectly helped point Gavin into a problem area with the cylinder head gas flow. May be Bill is giving a helping hand.

Brands Hatch results download pdf here

Mallory Park HRDC Touring Greats

Mallory Park May 30th 2011, televised live on Motors TV. The Borgward stars!!!!

The dust has settled from our exploits a week ago, or more accurately the spray has cleared and hopefully the car has now dried out from a VERY wet meeting at Mallory Park.

Last time out at Brands Hatch, the engine decided to finally eat one of the three small studs which held the air filter housing to the carburetter. I say finally because having taken the head off, this stud appears to have visited every single valve during the race and only actually went into the cylinder as we were putting the car onto the trailer!

As the head was off the plan was to make new inlet manifolds and try twin single barrel carburettors. But we were really struggling to find suitable carburettors we thought would actually be an improvement on what we had so in the end, and as time was tight, this has gone on the back-burner. What we did do though was take our “new” cam out. This had made the car virtually undriveable and proved if nothing else that horsepower isn’t everything. With just four gears a peaky engine just aint no good! BUT what we did do was some more work on the cylinder head and valves.

Having stripped the cylinder head what we found was a head that had been extensively gas flowed but fitted with absolutely standard valves! Ie all Bill Blydenstein’s meticulous drawings for modifying valves, seats etc had essentially been ignored by my engine man.

It seems some people just won’t be told and think “we do things differently now”. Not something I really understand, particularly if the person doing the telling was a top engineer in his time and whose input should not be simply ignored. In short we have now carried out the valve modifications as recommended by Blydenstein and the engine definitely feels better although I havn’t been back to the rolling road to find out exactly where we are now. So that’s what we went to Mallory Park with.

There were 28 cars in the Historic Racing Drivers Club “Touring Greats” race. The cars are split into four classes A: Cars over 2,701 cc, B: cars 1,600 – 2,700 cc, C: cars 1,201 – 1,600 cc (The Borgward), S: (Speedwell) for modified “A” series type engined cars.

We qualified 8th Overall, 1st in class and could probably have been 5th or 6th had I not been stuck behind another car for most of the session. The race itself was for 45 minutes, with one or two drivers. All cars must make a pit stop and the driver has to get out and back in even if they are not changing.

The race went really well. We came 9th overall, 1st in class C and fastest lap in class. I was a bit annoyed towards the end to find myself being blocked and weaved about outrageously by the class B Volvo Amazon’s 2nd driver to prevent me passing. They’ve got a lot of horsepower and he should have been up the road. If I’d got in front of HIM we would have beaten all the class B cars as well!

Gavin Watson