Where is my fuel?

IVA test today, so up at half past five to try to get to Norwich for 8. Unfortunately, we were held up by an accident on the way there, and ended up arriving around 8:30. I should mention that not only did it hail on the way there, it also snowed. This is not ideal in a car without a roof or windscreen. After I arrived, I had some coffee, and pretty soon I could feel my toes again.

The testers were very friendly and professional, and seemed genuinely interested in the car. When issues came up, they even spent some time phoning other stations to discuss details, so certainly a very fair appraisal.

Unfortunately, issues did indeed come up. Some trivial bits, and a few issues requiring a bit more effort to fix. No huge challenges or dangerous problems though, so that's something.

• Headlights and indicator positioning. Headlights too high and therefore obstructing drivers field of vision; indicators too far (by about 2 cm) from the outside edge of the vehicle. No two ways about it, the design of the headlight bar doesn't meet IVA requirements, although Peter thinks that his current design (unfortunately, I have an older design) should work.
• Steering column mount - at the point where the main column is mounted to the chassis, there is some flex in the mount, and the examiners indicated that they wanted to see some support for the mounting bracket. A bit of a judgement call this one, but no harm in beefing up the bracket a bit.
• Steering self-centering: there was none, and they obviously didn't feel (rightly, I think) that the springs on the rack were sufficient. Hopefully I can sort this out by fiddling with the geometry, but it's one of those things that I can't really test. Since they'd already reached a fail verdict by this point, we didn't try tweaking the toe settings. Oddly, there is loads of self-centering action in reverse, so if I can invert some aspect of the geometry, it should be good - this gives me some confidence that there is enough castor angle to get self-centering.
• Fuel tank strap, lack of. I used some supporting brackets to secure the tank, but they said they wanted to see either a full strap, or photos showing supporting brackets all around the tank, which isn't possible without removing panels - if I have to remove panels, I may as well add a full strap while I'm there.

Other details included a few non-radiused edges, but nothing very troubling. The use of this engine in the kit doesn't seem to present any particular problems - noise was 5 dB below the maximum (apparently that's a big margin, as these things go).

I got to find out the weight of the car, and was a bit disappointed to see that it's about 700 kg (no driver, nearly full fuel tank, full of oil etc). I reckon lighter wheels and battery will get me to about 650 kg; there's probably not much in the way of easy weight saving after that, or, to be honest, any real need for it...

On the positive side, they thought that the chassis looked good quality, and they seemed generally impressed by the way I'd put everything together, which was nice to hear.

Driving the car was good fun - now that I'm starting to get some confidence in the car, I gave it full beans a couple of times. It's very, very fast - the shift lights proved quite useful as there's not much time to look at the tach in the lower gears. Keeping up with the gear changes is fast work - it's really easy to accidentally get to the limiter in the first three gears. Given the amount of power I'm seeing, I think Jason is going to have some challenges dealing with 50% more again from the M3 motor...

Ergonomically, there's some work to be done. The huge steering wheel needs to go (after IVA, obviously); pedal layout needs improvement (less throttle travel); some kind of foot rest for the left foot, etc. There's very little space so this will be challenging - I don't think I'll get this to the level of the Elise, which has the advantage of not having to cram a gearbox between the occupants, so has much more space to play with.

My biggest concern is that it seems extremely thirsty, which is very worrying. It's probably not over-fueling (it passed emissions fine), so where is the fuel going? It's using probably twice as much fuel as it should, and I can't see it passing emissions or running properly if all of that was going into the engine. At a rough guess, it's getting about 10-15 mpg which doesn't seem right. A fuel leak is a scary scenario - I'll be going over the tank and fuel lines very, very carefully to eliminate this possibility.