Continuing with my Mini on-going project, and the constant want for more power, I have decided to finally bite the bullet and fork out for a new performance cylinder head – perhaps the single most efficient way of increasing power from the A-series. There are numerous companies that sell and produce cylinder heads for the Mini, such as Slark Racing, MED Engineering, Mini Spares, Rob Walker and many more.

However, after contacting my personal two favorites – Slark & MED. Both told me that their lead times on their cylinder heads are currently around 8-10 weeks which is way too long for me. Mini Spares always has heads on the shelf, but they bulk-produce heads (as far as I know) and they wouldn’t be of as good quality as the likes of Slarks or MED’s.

Rob Walker was my next phone call and he said about 3-4 weeks lead time on heads which wasn’t too bad. Then a friend of mine reminded/recommended me Vmax Scart. I phoned and spoke to Stuart and he said approx 3-4 days!! Brilliant.

So, as of Wednesday (tomorrow!) I am off to meet Stuart at Vmax Scart to pick up my new cylinder head. Its a stage 3.5 (approx) with 35.7mm x31mm valve sizes, along with double valve springs, bonze guides, and with the ability to accept Unleaded fuel. I’ll update with “install” pictures and how the car runs after its fitted!

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve stumbled over the same issue with jQuery a number of times. When you’re in an each loop within jQuery or some other reason when you’re using $(this), I continually have problems with finding and selecting a parent of $(this)

After a bit of searching, I’ve come across a lifesaver function built into jQuery. Closest()!

Quite simply…

$(this).closest('.class-name')

Seems to be working pretty good so far!

I organized a small meeting of my close mates & their cars last night. Was a good little turn out. I really wanted to get some industrial-style shots of all the cars from the evening and I don’t think I did too badly at it. Our first “shoot area” was in Old Portsmouth.

Then we headed off for a nice drive to Chichester to a car park I knew would be open. Multistory car parks are great for this sort of thing – ambient light is irrelevant since the car park provides such good white lightning inside! And luckily no one bothered us in this particular car park for the 1-hour+ we where there for.

Nice random Thursday meet-up. Although not as normal or random as Violent Running’s!