It’s 2am on Thursday morning. The Heasmans S14 was a midnight late addition to Tune House’s Dyno schedule. With Jim’s expert touch, the Heasman’s S14 produced maximum power (380kw) at the safest levels given it was a freshly built engine. Check out Heasmans Road to World Time Attack 2014 here.
We love a good battle and Sydney’s traffic didn’t disappoint. Our S14’s delayed arrival to Sydney Motorsport Park only brought smiles to our Pit Crew who had all the time in the world to prepare our S14’s home for the next three days. Lucky for us, as there were some really challenging times ahead.
A professional as always the late arrival of our S14 didn’t faze Nathan Antunes who used the time to sit with Scott Mitchell and give his thoughts on how our S14’s recent improvements would benefit his times throughout the weekend. Stay tuned for Scott Mitchell’s video below.
Nathan put our S14 through it’s paces on Practice day Thursday, but only managed to get in one flying hot lap before disaster struck and he started losing oil pressure. Nathan nursed our S14 back to the pits where we discovered a large oil leak from the rocker cover gasket. We sent one of the mechanics out to find us one but buy the time we had fitted the new gasket the Practice sessions had closed for the day.
Again only our Pit Crew were smiling as they had so much time on their hands to ready our S14 for Friday’s Sessions.
Jonathan pulls off the rocker cover to reveal the damaged gasket, and at this point we are still hopeful we can replace the gasket in no time to get back out for one more session in. Wasn’t to be.
With time on our hands we had the opportunity to take some of valued customer’s race machines out on track for a relaxed photoshoot.
One of our trusty Golf Karts for the weekend supplied by www.golfkart.com.au , best decision EVER!
With two flying Hot laps as the Plan and a fresh set of rubber, Nathan Antunes attacked Friday’s first session with a blistering first lap time of 1:35:1.
In the second flying lap, as Nathan powered out of turn 8, disaster struck yet again. Smoke started to fill the cabin and as the saying goes where there is smoke there is fire. Flames started to develop from one of the bonnet vents and Nathan quickly aborted his flying hot lap, resisting the urge to activate the fire bomb system. Nathan nursed our car back to the pits where our crew quickly extinguished the fire. No smiles from our pit crew now!
Our pit crew quickly established that an oil line was the cause of the fire and they were back to work so that our car was ready for the next session.
Using time wisely, Mitch from HalTech pulled the data from our S14’s ECU and along with Nathan and Matt, they assessed our car’s tune and performance.
Our chief engineer, Jonathon, worked hard to repair the fire damaged S14 and by the time we got some new oil lines made, we had missed our mid day session. Luckily Jonathon had our S14 ready for the afternoon session.
Nathan jumped back into the car and smashed out a few laps that afternoon until we brought the car back into the pits to check all the data logging and quickly noticed the fire had damaged some wiring in the engine bay, and also cooked our Haltech Wideband controller.
Our wiring guy quickly fixed the damaged wiring and the always helpful Mitch (Haltech) came to the rescue with a replacement wideband controller. During testing we had overheating issues so as a precaution we removed the waste gate to to make sure it was still doing it’s job. We skipped dinner and got the S14 back together at around 830pm. With high hopes we fired her up and to our surprise we noticed it had an exhaust leak, which was actually a failure of the turbo to manifold gasket. Luckily, we ended up finding one at around 9:30 pm and Jonathon put the whole car back together so we were ready to rock and roll on Saturday morning…
Pro driver Nathan Antunes starting day 3 with a brief re-cap of yesterday’s disaster and our hopes for the day to come.
Nathan rocketed out for our first session on Saturday morning with a 1:35.0 which became our fastest time of the weekend. The car was suffering from major boosting issues, which we could not fix trackside. The boost was cutting every where and that raised our concern for the life of our brand new engine. We want to get more than one weekend out of it.
Thankfully our tuner Jim from tunehouse was there to plug in and adjust our tune so Nathan could continue driving laps for the rest of the day without damaging our engine. Jim was with us all weekend, and was ready to help us whenever we needed it. Thanks Jim!!
It’s always great to get our S14 out on the track. The atmosphere and reaction from the crowd was overwhelming. Big credit to everybody involved in World Time Attack Challenge for bringing such a great event to Sydney Motorsport Park, it really is getting better and better every year.
We were very happy with our result in 2014 as we were 2.2 seconds faster than last year considering we did not make any changes to the aerodynamics or weight of our S14. We can credit our enhanced performace to a little bit more power and a few more suspension tweaks. It always helps to have a great driver in the likes of Nathan Antunes.
We look forward to 2015 where we hope to eclipse our 2014 result, be sure to check out the video below of our time at World Time Attack Challenge 2014.
Big shout out and thank you to the following:
Nathan Antunes.
Jim and his team from Tunehouse.
Mitch from Haltech.
Justin from Prowire.
Zi and the team from JDMYARD.
2sus Custom Re-Sprays.
Peter and John from Ideal Lubricants.
Berty from Cars For Hope.
Ved from SELECTNINE for event photo coverage.
Scott from Scott Mitchell Media for the event video coverage.
Last but not least, our smiling crew that keep our S14 on track,Jono, Matt, Chris, Jarrod, Paul and Brad Heasman.
