saaboteur

Last Saturday, did a trackday in the car. The track is short, a lot of second and third gear stuff, exacerbated by my AP2 trans, 4.44 gears, SOS supercharger and me not having been on track for a long while. The first session I was shifting quite often, and on the cool down lap I noticed it was hard to engage the gears. The issue got worse over the next two sessions, and then finally I couldn't even get it into gear with the engine running. By 'getting worse', I mean that there was some grinding, and on the way to the pitlane, depressing the pedal to engage first gear, could feel a bit of drag, ie. clutch not fully disengaging, car wanting to move ahead on its own. Never any slippage on track (or on the street) so I'm guessing it's not clutch mechanical, but hydraulic. I also figure that if something was killed on the disc (dead spring or something) I would hear it rattling around with the engine running, but I don't hear anything like that.

Had to tow it home, boo. Low-ish (and dirty!) fluid in the reservoir, but the slave still moved the fork. Tried a bleed, but to no avail. Noticed a bit of fluid on the interior end of the master, so replaced it. Did another bleed, but still no better. Pedal is soft, and even though the fork moves, it's insufficient to disengage the pressure plate. Basically same situation as when the car got towed home.

I figured there must be something with the slave, as it's squeaky now too, so I will replace that as well.

The bleed procedure was 'traditional' - two person (my dear and long suffering wife enlisted to pedal pump). I've only just noticed Billman's gravity bleed procedure, so I will actually try that tonight with the original slave.

Question is - can very hard track use, with many shifts compressed into a short period of time, induce such a situation? I'd say each track session was about 7-10 minutes. Is it just a bad bleed, or actual damage to the hydraulic components? Or is it mechanical, like the fork out of position somehow?