I spent the weekend a couple of weeks ago in Anglesey again. Colin and I had entered for the Welsh Racing Drivers Association races there. I did these races a couple of years ago too and had had a great time. After the 750 meeting a few weeks ago it was hard to resist.
The photo here, by the way, I’ve nicked from the WRDA site. I hope they don’t mind… This is just after thestart of the first race on Saturday and I’m in 7th place having had to take avoiding action from that Mondeo in front of me which made an attempt at knocking me off the track. He later on made another attempt on Colin (who’s actually in the lead here) which battered Colin’s already considerably battered car rather seriously.
I booked myself in for half a day’s testing on the Friday before the meeting. After the rubbish season that I’ve been having I was giving myself a talking to about not overdriving the thing but I don’t know that it was really doing much good. Mind you, I might not as well have bothered with the testing as the weather was appalling. Not only was it chucking it down with rain, but the wind was astonishing. There’s a little wind turbine in the paddock, reputed to supply enough power for the power takeoffs in the paddock, and it looked as though it was about to take off all day.
When we’d been here earlier in the season, my FL was 1:17.26, although other class C people were doing in the region of a second quicker than that. (Apart from the bonkerd people like Tim Gray who was another half second quicker again.) In the first test session I did a whole 1:33.34 which give you an idea what the weather was like. The second session was down to 1:26.23 as the rain had stopped by then and the circuit was starting to dry. It was still very slippy though as you can tell from the times.
The Saturday race day dawned surprisingly nice. I’d been assuming that we were in for doom and pestilence the whole weekend but apparently not. We were racing on the Coastal circuit this day, as shown in the diagram here. This is the circuit that we used for the 750 meeting a while ago. The race on Sunday, though, was on the international circuit which includes a couple of different corners and some additional straights.
The WRDA races include all sorts of different classes meaning that just about anything can race. As such there were a couple of very quick ex-BTCC cars there and a real collection of other odds and sods including Colin and me. It was clear that many people had entered this race so as to get some more track time in additional to the race that they were “really” supposed to be in. In qualifying it was interesting to see that Colin and I used normal RGB tactics and got right near the front of the queue. The similarity of performance in RGB means that there’s a premium for getting on track early and having a couple of clearish laps. However, once qualifying started we did the first lap moderately slowly, so as to allow all the grid out of the assembly area before we got back to the start. Some dumbo in a Cateringvan charged past us on the first lap which meant we had to barge past him a bit later in qualifying. He’d almost certainly have been better sitting behind us and trying to get a tow.
As it was, I ended up with a 1:16.98 which was a bit quicker than before which was nice. I was 6th on the grid, behind Colin though who’d managed a 16.2. No idea how as I was just behind him all the time. My fastest lap was actually on the very last lap which was odd, normally I’ve gone off the boil by then.
We were doing two races on the Saturday, first and last on the programme, with the starting order for the second being determined by the finishing order in the first race. So, we lined up rather early and after a rather luxiourious green flag lap, we gridded up. I was just behind Colin who was behind the Seat. Before the race the chap who drives the Mondeo had tried to make out, rather unsportingly, in my opnion, that the race would be a rolling start. As he was already waaay quicker than everyone else on a 1:12.3 that seemed rather odd.
As it turned out the front wheel drive cars were very slow off the line, which probably explains the rolling start issue. When the lights went out Colin got past the Seat which baulked me as I tried to go round the outside. Then the pole-sitting Mondeo, which several of us including me and Colin had passed at the start, swiped across in the front of me and I had to get out of the throttle; it seemed to me as though he wasn’t looking too hard at what was going on about him. Most amazing of all, Chris Allanson (of whose company, Z-Cars, I’ve read a lot) shot past us to end up some way in front of me. He’d started two rows behind me so was obviously going well. His car was a “Mini” which had a Hayabusa engine and which seemed to be quicker in a straight line than me but slower in the corners.
Up at the front Mondeo man barged past Colin on the back straight on the second lap, knocking Colin’s bodywork about considerably in the process. Chris had a grandstand view and he was pretty forthright about it afterwards. Then the couple of highly powered (think 300bhp) Caterfields in front of me got past Chris and I ended up just behind him. 
We had a great time, to be honest although I noticed that Chris was taking the Corkscrew very wide which I’d learnt was the wrong thing to do when were here before. On the next lap he did the same again, after having missed the apex at Peel by some distance and I stuck the Fury (or a “Fun”, as the programme had it) up the inside and I was past. The problem is, I wasn’t really quicker and I then spent the next few laps driving the widest car on the track.
Then Chris managed to get a much better run through Church than he had done and he just blasted past on the way up to Rocket. I could have made an issue about it, but that didn’t seem very sporting. Then it was back to me crawling all over Chris again but on the last lap we caught up a few backmarkers and there wasn’t time to make anything stick.
So, I finished in 6th place and would start the next race from that position, just alongside Chris. My fastest lap was 1:16.76 but that was before I got past Chris after which we’d clearly both affected each others’ lap times. Mind you, Chris’s fastest lap was 1:17.13 so I should have been able to drive away from him. Needless to say, I didn’t. I went to search him out in the paddock afterwards to check that he was OK about the width of my car. I needn’t have worried as he was a most gracious competitor. In fact, he had clearly had an absolute whale of a time. I was really looking forward to starting the next race alongside him, although which his starting ability (which he attributed to grass tracking experience) I suspected he’d be in the lead by the time I got going.
I’ll put the rest in the next post, as this one’s already a bit long.