1451 BTCC

BTCC

16 July 2007, 84,033

n the 15 July, I drove to Castle Donington to watch the British Touring Car Championships and of course all of the support races. Unfortunately, rain stopped play or at least most of it. Indeed the forecast wasn’t brilliant leading up to the day but on the Friday before, it reckoned we would see it rain from mid to late afternoon onwards. Encouraged by this optimistic forecast, I still went, meeting a friend in Pontefract and hoping for the best.

Thirty miles south on the A1 it started to rain. A few minutes later and we were driving in heavy rain. It let up for a few minutes for the rest of the day but it’s fair to say that the day was washed out. The touring car races were still on as the organisers really, really don’t want to cancel these (it means refunding tickets) but almost all of the support races were cancelled. After the lunch time BTCC event we were faced with a three hour wait for the next motorsport event. In heavy rain, we made the walk back to the now soggy, muddy car park hoping that we wouldn’t get stuck on the way out.

Fortunately, although slippery we were in no danger of getting stuck and the trip north was uneventful aside the very heavy rain and spray on the motorway. Since myself and my passenger and all of our belongings were soaking wet I ran the air conditioning and had absolutely no problems with the interior misting up. I arrived home a good four hours than I was originally expecting…

I’m still planning to go to Snetterton in late July, lets hope the weather is better though! Snetterton is very close to two hundred miles from York, twice the distance of Castle Donington; if the weather is looking just a little inclement then I’ll have no problems in not going.

Meanwhile, I put the Saab to good use for a mid week trip to and from Bedford Aerodrome to a Palmersport Day. This meant heading south on the Wednesday afternoon from our Leeds office and using the A1, then heading north on the Thursday evening using the A1. For both trips I made heavy use of cruise control set at sixty five, which is around and about mid way between the legal speed limit of seventy and HGV pace. It’s a compromise, then, between covering ground and sipping diesel. Drive the TiD for a couple of hours on the motorway at fifty six miles per hour and the car returns somewhere around sixty five to the gallon, it just seems to take forever to get anywhere. At seventy, it’s somewhere in the high forties, but you cover ground at a decent page. Sixty five indicated yields fifty four to the gallon and you cover the country well enough. It’s around one hundred and fifty miles each way, three hours or so. For the return trip the trip computer claimed fifty four miles per hour and per gallon.

The 9-3 has simply continued as I’ve known him to. On a wet road if the driver is too keen, the car understeers /link/ and I have yet to experience any oversteer /link/. There’s wheelspin if you try too hard, especially if the VP44 DieselTune unit /link/ is turned up, but the handling is staid and boring.

Earlier this week the car reminded me that the service is now due, it’s already been 9,000 miles since the last service. This is booked for mid to late August. By then the car will have covered around 10,500 miles since the last service. I’ve no service issues to raise apart from the wiper blades, which I intend to change before then.

However, the cabin temperature sensor, part of the automatic air conditioning system, has died a death. It has been faulty for a long time, I did attempt a rescue mission a few weeks back and this worked fairly well, but it hasn’t worked since mid July. As I’ve maintained all along the 9-3 needs a new sensor, I’m just too tight to buy one. I will. After an hour or so the automatic air conditioning reckons the interior of the car is very hot and therefore pumps the cabin full of icy cold air.

For a day in mid July the Saab was almost forgotten. I was invited to a Palmersport day down at Bedford Aerodrome and spent the day driving all sorts of high powered cars, including the Jaguar XKR, the Porsche 911 JP3 and the Renault Clio Cup Racer. It was welcome to get back into the 9-3, which whilst materially slower than almost everything else I’d driven, was also a damn sight more comfortable. The drive home just melted away, my only issue is that the cabin temperature sensor was insisting that the cabin temperature was much higher than it really was.

That’s the Saab thing, though. It’s a great place for the driver to sit for a long period of time. It’s less comfortable for the front passenger, because the big, comfortable seats do not offer all that much in the way of lateral support. It’s expensive to service, it’s not the most economical of the sector... but it’s a likeable machine nevertheless.