CPL Racing breaks into the 9’s!

We’ve Done It !!!!!

As I’m sure everyone reading this bulletin will know, CPL Racing have lead the way in setting numerous European records in their Honda Civic Type R over the past six years, being the first Honda in Europe to smash the 12, 11, and 10 second barriers.  And now we are delighted to announce that Guy Chamberlain, driving his turbocharged Civic, broke into the 9’s this weekend, running an amazing 9.91 second pass at 149 mph, later backing this up with a 9.93 second pass. 

Breaking the 9 second barrier has required unrivalled determination as it needed design from scratch of a drag racing dog engagement gear kit, extensive chassis analysis and suspension setup and lots of sleepless nights finding and designing engine components which could handle the power that we needed in the car.  Thanks to Elliot Dason-Barber of Virtual Racer for the extensive analysis work undertaken on the chassis, tyre wear and data-logs, the ARP head studs so kindly designed specifically for us, superior quality lines and fittings generously supplied by Earls Performance and high grade oil supplied by Millers Oils we were slowly chipping away at the times.  This time last year we were, however, having problems with spark plugs giving up on us after only one ¼ mile run and NGK kindly stepped in to provide us with something more substantial so that we could at least get the plugs to last for a day’s racing until we could find a longer-term solution over the winter of the car consuming spark plugs quicker than five litres of race fuel!!!!

The 12 and 11 second barriers were reasonably comfortable to achieve given our growing knowledge at this time of the Honda engines and gearboxes.  Helped by the winning Clutchmasters clutch and Quaife differential combination that we were the first to use in Europe.  In addition the Hondata engine management gave us exactly the flexibility we needed with all the various N/A, supercharged, turbo and nitrous setups that we experimented with in this period, and Doug and Javier at Hondata kindly gave us extensive technical support to enable us to push the boundaries ever further with the car.

Getting into the 10s was much more challenging as we were starting to break numerous standard parts on the car such as gearboxes, driveshaft and engine mounts, but we achieved this exactly three years ago in June 2007, which meant we had to call on the services of Hauser Racing to provide us with a high specification roll cage to meet the strict safety standards of the MSA and Santa Pod officials.

Despite pushing the car to its limits this weekend it is still
very much intact and having hit 149 mph we are resigned to the fact that
having spend the past six years getting weight off the car, we will now
have to add a little to the back by fitting the parachute that Hauser
Racing have donated to us.