Trackday & drift Mettet 28/03/2026

TL;DR Wet wet wet 
All pictures courtesy of GT Production

Although I had planned on going to the Belgians On Track event of April 3rd, I finally chose to go to the "Trackday & drift" week-end organized by Pierre Malderez / Malderez Racing instead. Same circuit, same week, same weather. The fact that I wouldn't need taking a day off was the decisive element.

I had the car serviced and the thermostat replaced just in time for that week-end, and did replace the safety-wire on the differential that was leaking a bit again. I assume I didn't do it right after the Quaife had been fitted. Anyway, as I had my car raised at HoS to do the work, I was told not to use the NS2 tyres I had shred the threads off during the previous trackday in October. It would be too dangerous.

So I got the Uniroyal RainExpert back on the rear, on the original Juno wheels. As they have no "rotation" to respect and only an "outside"/"inside" wall, I was able to flip left and right in order to have the better tyre on the right-side wheel. Mettet is a circuit that wears the right side the most.

The drive from Liège to Mettet was a wet hell. It felt safe with the adequate tyres, but it was tiresome and needed to remain fully focused all the way.

There, the track was wet all morning, only dried by the passing cars in the afternoon.

It was all good fun with the Caterham; I kept it in "wet/commute" mode in order to keep it under control with the progressive gas pedal and limited anger overall.

In the afternoon it began overheating a bit again. I got the O2 (lambda) sensor spacer our after lunch, to no avail. After that we tried purging any remaining air from the cooling circuit, there wasn't much and didn't solve anything.

Around 3PM I ended up with a lambda value that couldn't get lower than 2.2 while driving; so I called it quits. There was no way I could drive on track with the ECU that would run the engine over-rich because of the faulty sensor.   I had a spare Bosch LSU 4.9 but forgot it home.  When I got it on the car on the next morning, it was actually dead on arrival, with a value of 2.5.

I did spend a nice evening with the HoS team and another driver, and came back home. As I had kept the top off from the afternoon, it was really cold and drove with my helmet on. With a pair of spare wheels on the passenger seat (the other pair of Juno with theit original Avon ZT7), I had little room to store it anyway.

On the next day we went back as visitors, weather was a bit nicer. Still quite windy though : it was enjoyable to to breath exhaust fumes, brake dust and burned rubber... but the time reserved for the motorcycles on Saturday had been cut short as soon as a rider had been wiped clear of off the track by a strong gust of wind. He was alright but the bike is probably a write-off.

I also gave a try on the drift circuit, that wasn't a great success. The grip on the rear axle was too good, the ATB differential was doing its magic, and I was losing the front more than anything. I just got around the wet track once and got out.