Donington debâcle

Sometimes I wonder why I bother. I really might as well have stayed at home.

Before telling you the complete story, here’s a photo. Many thanks to Dave Hackett for this rather stylish attempt.

The second photo, and the others in this post were taken by Derek Jones’ Dad, whose name I seem to have forgotten. My excuse is old age.

This one was taken on lap 1 of the race and you can see my red car in the foreground on hill up to MacLeans. Derek’s white car can be seen at the top right and is already a loooong way up the track…

The first problem was that the club lost my entry for the Allcomers race which I’d been intending to do in lieu of testing which is very expensive at Donington. I now think that this was because I sent in the entry using the facilities that the club provides in the form of the Acrobat field data rather than as the complete Acrobat document. It seems as though when sent in this form it confuses the people up in darkest deepest Norfolk.

So, I went all the way to Donington for a single 13min +1 lap race with no testing of any form.

Qualifying was a bit of a disaster. Over the years racing I’ve come to know that I really need to test at a circuit to get any chance of getting up to speed. With the absence of the allcomers this was never going to be any good and so it proved. My previous FL at Donington was 1:21.09 and I knew that going at least half a second faster was easily feasible. However, during the first few laps I was really just getting up to speed, trying to stay flat through the Craners and marvelling on how quick the Old Hairpin is.

There was a problem though. As an experiment I’d tried changed the carb main jet size before getting here and it was looking as though it was a bad idea. Although there was a lot of headwind down the main straight I wasn’t getting out of 5th gear, as I’d normally expect to be. Looking at the logs afterwards and I was hugely slower down that straight than I was last year (111 instead of 122 mph).

And then it all went horribly wrong. Someone, not sure who, dumped a load of oil at Redgate and for a lot of the rest of the circuit. I had a couple of hairy moments approaching Redgate wondering what the gravel was going to be like. As such the miserable 1:22.8 that I’d managed earlier in qualifying was going to have to do. That’s right, about 1.8 slower than last year when I could clearly have gone faster. I was 17th on the grid, 10th in class. I hadn’t been this far back for ages. I was even behind Adrian for the first time ever.

I spent some of the interval putting the carb jets back as they were. Talking to Andy, who’d originally suggested the change, my experience was pretty typical in that the car had felt much better in the mid-range, but the top end power was down. That would certainly fit with what I’d seen on the logger.

The thing is, I perhaps shouldn’t have bothered.

Perhaps the problem really is that I approached the race thinking that I really had to get on it as fast as I could before everyone else got away from me. Consequently, I set off really quickly. In fact, I got a really good start and passed quite a number of people on the run to Redgate and down the Craners and the Old Hairpin. The photo here is at Redgate, you can see I’m already past Adrian, although I’m not entirely sure what Neil is doing all the way  out there on the right. I actually had to brake a bit at Redgate because Tim Gray in front was having a bit of a moment.

Then I was a bit too far to the right on the approach to MacLeans, making an over-ambitious attempt to get up the inside of Rob Grant if I’m honest. All of a sudden the car jumped out of gear. That meant that I ran too far to the right, got it on the grass and the car spun right across the track into the kitty litter on the left. Miraculously, I missed everyone. In the photo here you can see that I’m on the grass and spinning. I’m just about to shoot across the front of Phil Alcock’s car, nearest the camera.

More accurately, they missed me. Laurels must go to Phil who as you can see was very close to me. How the hell he avoided contact I have no idea.

So, there I was stuck. I got out of the car and the marshalls did a “live snatch” which essentially means they sent in a large tractor to pull the car out of the trap. The only good note from the whole weekend really was that they did this with the front towing eye I made a while ago. This worked a charm; they could tow the car forwards without it diving into the gravel and the welding didn’t pull apart which I’d been slightly concerned about. What I would like to do, though, is use a flexible connection to the chassis, with something like a bit of old seat belt webbing. You can see the tractor in this photo. If you look hard you can see me (white helmet, black overalls). Even at this range there seems to be a distinct downcast look about me.

So, that was my race weekend. There’s now a few weeks before Silverstone. I’ll have to try harder next time, where “harder” probably means relaxing a bit. One bright note, though, is that I won the day’s “Pewter Spoon” award. I’d kind of like not to do this again, to be honest…

It’s the time of the year when the Birkett entries go in and I’m in an entry from “RGB East”, there’s also an RGB West you’ll not be surprised to know. RGB West essentially beat us last time (I’m using “us” slightly flexibly here because this was just after I’d set the car on fire so I wasn’t actually racing) by a whole 0.6 second after 6 hours of racing. The race looks even better this year as it’s taking place on the International circuit. Of course, none of us has any experience whatsoever with this layout. That could be fun…