The build up has begun!

Survived April Fool’s Day (sadly my 1.4 Golf did not but my revenge will be sweet…) My day has been made – Tom got his dates mixed up and can do Knockhill, so that is him secured for the first 3 rounds, awesome!

Roy, demon detailer is here again and treating the car to some of his finest Carnuba wax and a machine polish. I cannot tell you how hard Roy works on keeping our car in the best condition possible. It isn’t easy keeping a racer looking top dollar, especially when there is no budget whatsoever for resprays. I think you will agree that despite the wobbly kevlar, it looks fab.

In other news, the brand spanker Solaris ECS turned up today. Solaris are a new sponsor for ZEN in 2009 – Paul is totally won over by this engine management system, it really does do the job in the best possible manner and we have fitted a few to customer cars already.

After hours and the lads are chipping away at the to do list. Santa’s little helper is here (names have been changed to protect the innocent) and he has whipped the brakes off. We are making way for new stopping power - we are currently trying to negotiate a deal.

Said elf has also started attacking the driver’s door fit. We had so many problems with these doors last year. At point of purchase we were led to believe they would fit like a glove but alas they did not and we had to modify and improve them a hell of a lot, just to get them to go on the car! As the season wore on the poor fit became more problematic, as can be seen in the photo below.

The front wing and bumper are being filled and prepped for paint by Tim, having sustained some damage in the final at Brands Hatch in 2008 (the famous gravel trap incident). Paul has put together a dummy engine to help with planning out the engine bay enhancements

Today I hacked more out of the budget, this is going to be a no frills season that’s for sure (we will be the ones in the tents out the back of the Holiday Inn ;)) Smiles all round though, as we had 2 crates of Alibi delivered from Olly @ Solution Sciences. That should keep us going!

Go out and buy the Pomegranate flavour and you will be supporting POM354, working to replace Afghanistan’s opium poppy fields with pomegranate trees. Nice work.

Final thought for the day: keeping all this secret is tough, as I for one am really very excited! Today we agreed a deal to provide Duncan Graham, Club Challenge driver #6, with on-event trackside support at Oulton Park. Go Duncan!   He doesn’t actually know yet that we are going to be competing too!