I’d never done anything with repairing body work before, but I guess you can’t race without it happening sooner or later. Just be thankful it’s only minor damage!

In the morning we set about sorting the cooling system out after it got a little hot at Cadwell Park. Basically we were just bleeding and refilling it, but also changing the concentration of the coolant. The afternoon and evening was where the fun and games started.

On closer inspection the damage looked a bit worse than we remembered, but it looked like it would pull back. The first trick was the heating it and quickly cooling it method which can pull dents back. You could see it working, but with part of the damage being on a crease in the metal it just wasn’t strong enough to pull back, so we would use the good ole fashioned method – a big hammer. Removing the wheel arch lining meant I could bash the dent out. Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist but it took a good chunk of the afternoon, but it does look surprisingly good. Unless you get close to the car and look at the lines you’d struggle to see where it has been repaired.

The evening is where the real fun and games started though. After our previous attempts of wheel alignment going surprisingly well with a block of wood with nails in we tackled four wheel alignment, something which is usually quite expensive to have done in garages. You’ll never get it as accurate, but you’ll get it fairly close, or close enough anyway for all the money saved. It’s a bit of a faff, required some bodging, and a lot of swearing with seized track rods. But we, or rather Ian got there in the end. The only thing we didn’t know was how accurate it was, so heading to Mallory would be another weird tracking adventure. Marvelous!