I was looking forward to this weekend!
The plan was to travel up Thursday on my own, then Dan, Dad and William woud come up Friday afternoon. Unfortunetly William couldn’t come as he had a birthday party he really didn’t want to miss, so this would be my first race without his support and company, which I was pretty gutted about. I love the racing and everything associated with it, and the boys weekend with my son is a big part of it for me. Anyhow, as it turned out it was a very good job he didn’t come!!!
I arrived at about midnight on Thursday, the paddock area for RGB was small, but I was expecting there still to be plenty of room as it was Thursday night, I was wrong!! The area was rammed, which was made worse by the fact that the big “non essential parking” area was fenced off due to what looked like reseeding of the grass. After much faffing about I managed to squeeze on the end of an access road between the Rob and Andy Grant and the 750 Formula area, unloaded the car and popped the tent up.
As usual I got next to no sleep due to the excitement and the joys of camping, so at 6am I was in the shower block dodging the manky shower curtain. I had filled the car and 2 jerry cans on the way over on Thursday night and the car was all checked and ready to go so I set about setting up my new (to me) 6x3 gazebo. This thing ways a ton, and is pretty tricky to erect on your own, especially in the tight pace I had squeezed into, but as the weekend progressed it would prove to be a life saver!! I then went to sign on with a few of the other RGB’ers, and was very disappointed to find that we only had 4 x 25min sessions all day, 2 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon! The morning session only had 17 cars in it, but the afternoon had 39!!! Oh well, I’d better make the most of the morning sessions!
About 20mins before heading out I started the car up and let it tick over to warm up while I got changed, but when I returned the dash was showing warning lights for water and oil temp!!!! The engine didn’t feel warm at all, but water temperature was showing over 110, oil about 150 degs and oil pressure through the floor! Dave Wale had just turned up so I grabbed him and Andy Bates to see if he knew of anything it could be, we checked the water and used an infra red thermometer to check temperature of the block. There was no way the engine was as hot as it was saying, but I was due out in 10 minutes and would be driving blind, not knowing what the engine was up to! Then Andy had an idea, was the digidash displaying in Fahrenheit and bar? It isn’t possible to change this on the digidash itself, so I loaded up the digidash software on my PC and had a look at the setting,. I have 2 versions of the digidash analysis tool, the older version (which David always used) didn’t allow to change this, but when I opened up the newer version I had downloaded, the option was there! I tried to revert it back to to degs C and PSI, but for some reason it would only allow me to change the pressure. We had been called for session 1, so I decided I’d better make use of the session, and sort the dash out when I got in.
I relearnt my way round the circuit, but my mind wasn’t on it after all the rushing around before, added to the fact my dash was lit up like a Christmas tree warning me of high temperatures and low pressures and no gear read out which was causing me to think and worry about the engine rather than the driving. This coupled to the fact he rear end of the car was all over the place and Session one was a bit of a disaster, with a big spin at Church.
After a waste of time phone call to EBT instruments about the digidash, I started playing with the settings. When I uploaded the config file for
Everyone was saying how light the rear of the car was were making changes to the settings, so session 2 I decided to soften the rear off a bit to try and increase the rear end to grip. So I set for session 2, fought with the car and and had 3 spins, either the changes had really buggered things up or I was just an idiot who should hang his gloves up!! I pulled into the pits during the session and dialed the rear suspension in harder (actually slightly harder than I had started in the morning), but by the time I got out again the chequred flag had come out. I was in a bad mood, what a waste of a morning and I was nowhere near the laptime I wanted!
Over lunch I checked the car over and decided to stiffen the front up this time, but was expecting the afternoon session to be too busy to get any meaningful laptimes in, especially as we were in with the locosts, which are considerably slower than the Rgb cars. But too my delight, the changes seemed to work and the car was handling a lot better, and the locosts pulled over to let us past (thanks chaps if you read this)! But I think the biggest improvement was my state of mind, I made sure I was ready in plenty of time and sat in the car and focused for 10 minutes before the start of the session. Another lesson learnt, I must try and get some quiet time in the car before going out to get in the right state of mind.
By the end of the day I was feeling really good on the track, and managed a 1.15.97, I had set my target to get as close to 1.16 so was very very chuffed!
Not long after Dan and Dad arrived, and after going for a frantic search to buy a new gas bottle for the BBQ we settled down for a couple of beers and a proper mans BBQ, i.e. pure meat plus some crisps, no silly lettuce or greens.
After a terrible nights sleep due to he wind and rain, resulting in giving up trying to sleep in the tent at 2.30am and moving to the back seat of the mondeo, i tried to get ready for qualifying. It was raining big time, so after signing on I swapped to the wet tyres and softened off the suspension (so all the set up time yesterday was not useful!). Luckily it stopped raining for qualifying, but the surface was very wet and slippery.
I came in not knowing if I had managed a decent time or not, so when the results were released and I found myself 9th and 10th I was over the moon!! The grid was all over the place and I found myself a head of some of the seriously fast guys!
It felt very strange being this far up the grid waiting for the lights to go out, I had to try and keep my head and juts try and hold my position as bets as possible, I very much doubted I could finish this high up, let alone overtake anyone. The race started and there were very few incidents (well done RGB boys and girls), but I did lose my head and spun coming out of peel. Up until that point I had a lost a few places to the faster cars and also not defending my line properly (Henry Carr passed me twice up the inside coming into rocket), but was happy until I lost it. For the emainder of the race I tried to catch up my lost positions until suddenly I lost all drive. The clutch was slipping very badly so I slowly came down towards the pits frantically pumping the clutch pedal. As I was about to come in, I had drive again, so I decided to carry on. I finished the race in 16th and 8th in class with no more clutch problems. I was disappointed I had chucked it away with the spin, but happy I had finished.
So in the pouring rain (but luckily under my gazebo) we set about changing the clutch, but luckily realized before we had got too far, it was infact the clutch cable. The plastic coating had frayed and was causing the cable to stick. I couldn’t get hold of a new cable so we lubed up the old one and hoped it would last for race 2 on Sunday.
After a cracking RGB BBQ in the bar and plenty of beer I had a great nights sleep in the windy tent. Although I woke up feeling a little worse for wear, the weather looked a lot better, it was windy, but dry! With half an hour before our call it still looked dry so I put the dry tyres back on and clicked the suspension back up to what I had ended with after testing on Friday.
The race went fantastically, see the video below (sorry about the smear on the camera lense caused by leaving it too close to the frying pan):-
There was a nasty crash between Tim, Doug and Rob Grant. Luckily no one was hurt but the race was red flagged for a considerable time to clear it up.
After a great battle with Andy Grant I finished 3rd in class!!!! My first trophy!! And just to make the day even better I won the tyre draw!!
