Birkettastic

Last weekend was the Birkett and we were up again racing in team Eastern Delight (we decided to give it a better (?) name this time). The Birkett is a unique event being, if you don’t know, a 6 hour relay race for teams of up to 6 cars and drivers. In this week’s Autosport Marcus Pye got it just right in his column where he says:

“Once hooked, teams return year after year, blind to the strong chance of inhospitable weather, because it’s great fun. And, given a fair wind after a summer of sprint races, plenty of mileage for your money. The perfect opportunity to wear machinery out prior to the winter rebuild is oversubscribed from the moment the regulations are published. Like being on the waiting list for a Bournemouth beach hut, it may take years to join the party, but that only heightens the anticipation.”

To me that gets it exactly right. To get another idea what it’s like, see the photo above, taken after last weekend’s race. You will probably think that we seem to exceeded the maximum number of drivers slightly, but that’s the entire team including all the hangers on. The lunatic on the left is Guy, our team manager who seems to enjoy nothing so much as bossing us around for a day. Eagle eyed readers will notice Anthea standing in front of me. (I’m the mop of unkempt grey hair at the back.)

Anyway, back to the beginning. Having spent a while getting the car sorted for the race, as described previously, we drove over to Silverstone on the Thursday evening before the race on the Saturday. The race was taking place on the Silverstone International circuit which I’ve not done before. It was also on this circuit last year but that was just after Anthea had had her coronary bypass operation and it didn’t seem sensible to get involved in such a race at the time. So, I wanted to the outrageously over-priced test day that the circuit was offering us.

We’d rented a garage so we parked up behind it, in readiness for another three members of our team to meet up on the Friday morning. In the morning it all looked a bit greasy and wet. However, the forecast was good, which was more than could be said for the race day.

We only got three 30 minute sessions for our £170 (!!!) so we got out early and found out what the circuit was like. Slippery was the answer and the fastest lap in the morning session for me was 1:50.8. My target for the day was to get below 1:35 which was the fastest lap that an RGB class B car had done in the Birkett last year. So, 1:50 wasn’t very clever but, as I said, it was slippery.

Later on and it dried up a lot. In the next session I got down to 1:34.3 and I knew I could make that about a second quicker at least. To get an idea what this circuit is like, here’s that lap:

After that session I decided to call it a day as I didn’t want to risk bending the car and it was clear that I did now know, sufficiently, my way round the circuit.

So, in the afternoon I got the car scrutineered and we moved camp over into the outer paddock. As there’s hundreds of cars in the Birkett we’re limited to how many vehicles are allowed in the main paddock. Later on, all the rest of the cars arrived and this is a fragment of our garage at the end of the day. This space would be used by a single F1 team, so they’d have two cars in here. We (and there’s four  teams of RGBers  in here) had 22 cars. Oh, and that’s the safety car over there in the far corner too.

In the night it rained.

And rained.

And, in the morning it was really wet. Ho hum. Still it was the Birkett and we were going to enjoy ourselves. We’d got load of provisions in as you can see, we had hundreds of litres of fuel and we needed to have fun. So, after we did qualifying (which is a bit daft really as the grid positions are allocated on the basis of the times we submit to the handicappers. The qualifying session is just to satisfy the regs that say you have to do three laps of qualifying. I was down to do the start, for some unknown reason I’d volunteered. As we were on row 5 of the grid that meant there were about 45 cars behind me at the start. Stalling would be a very, very, bad idea.

And, as the start time approached it rained even more. Eventually we went through the start procedure which, for the first time ever in a start that I’ve done, proceeded to the times shown on the boards. Normally, the club just goes through the 5 minute/3 minute/1 minute/30 second boards as fast as they can so as to keep the meeting rolling along. This time, as the Birkett is scheduled to start at 11:15 exactly, it was done to schedule. Eventually we were off. You can see the first couple of laps and a few other bits of my first session, which took just over 40 minutes and in which I did 19 laps, in this video.

We had been a bit worried about tank capacity before the race. This is because key to doing well in the Birkett is optimising the changeovers between the cars and running for a long time is a Good Thing. After the session I measured the tank and found I’d used a whole 10 litres. At that rate I could have kept going for another hour or so! My FL in this first session was about 2:04 which is reason for this. The problem in the wet is that RGB cars just can’t get any heat into the tyres and the cars are so light and they just skitter about on top of the puddles, which you can probably see in the video. Mind you, we were as daft as that chap in the Radical you can see in the video. He rammed the pit wall on the very  first lap. That, of course, brought out the safety car so we were doing laps at around 2:40 before they cleared up the mess.

At the end of the day, we finished in 19th position on the road which was actually in first place for our class. In that I did 42 laps and about 1 hr 20 mins on the track. It’s not wonder I was so tired later that day. The problem is we got shafted on the handicap and ended up 50th on handicap. As you can see in the video we were just being driven around by bigger, heavier, tintops all the time. (And those BMWs apparently had ABS which seems a mite unfair. How’s that then?)

All the same, we had a great time. Roll on next year. Let’s pray for non-rain next year!

Now, though, it’s down to the serious business of the winter. First thing will be to tidy the Fury away and then it’s back to the Spectre. I’ll tell you all how I’m getting on with it soon. Problem is, I’m a bit short of time at the moment as I’m lecturing on this course at the University at the moment in my copious spare time.