I was a little apprehensive about doing this trip, mainly because my car had only covered about 2500 miles since its rebuild and I was about to double it. I needn't have worried, the car ran very well. I had spent the last couple of weeks checking, greasing etc etc and did not really expect to have any issues but you never really know in a car that is over 30 years old.
We averaged 27/28 mpg over the 2500 miles, 35 mpg was the best and 21 mpg the worst while tackling the mountain routes around Stelvio.
At one point we did suffer steering column shake and vibration but this was quickly diagnosed when the radio fell out and I realised that the H frame bolts had come undone.
We had another issue with a change in exhaust note and strange vibration which did get me a little worried, once we pulled into the service station this changed to a rattle from under the car, after a quick inspection, I found that the exhaust hanger U bolt had come loose, this was tightened and everything was fine again.
Apart from a little tyre to bodywork contact, that's about it.
I did learn quite alot about the car, this has given me a couple of things to investigate.
I had fitted 100 Watt bulbs for the event, while these were superb in complete darkness, with no reflective road markings or signs, If you tried to use main beam on anything reflective you were immediately blinded. My plan to overcome this is to fit some HID lights, they'll be the topic of another post.
My car handled exceptionally well, even in very wet conditions, what it didn't like was crossing road expansion joints in mid corner at high speeds, this became quite uncomfortable when going through series of tunnels during the trip. Not sure what I'm going to do about this as I cant slow down....... I think it looked more dramatic from the cars that were following as the car moved around. I don't plan on changing the wheel and tyre set up so I think I will have a mess around with the damping.
Developed a couple of oil leaks, one from the head gasket and one from the front crank seal, all pretty much standard stuff.
Might have a play around with diff ratios as the car does lack a little pull away performance, I think this is due to having 215/40 R16 tyres. I'm currently running with a 3.89 diff, I plan to swap this in the next few weeks to a 4.11 and see how that goes. I will happily trade some top speed for more acceleration.
I guess the only other thing to mention is that I had a pretty good co-driver, my brother Andy, he was quite happy to sit back and let me drive, when he did drive, he respected the fact that this was my car. We also met some great people during the event, only problem being that I didn't really remember any names but I'm sure we will meet up on future events.
The following link should take you to a short video of the GT6 at the Nurburgring http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ut2zz2841w
Thanks to Ellis and all at Club Triumph who organised the event.
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