A little vignette of an RGB/750 club paddock:

I took my cordless drill to Mallory, as I always do. I didn’t use it though. However, two other people borrowed it:

• Adrian was having cat problems, again, and used the drill to hack out the remains of yet another expensive waste of money
• Andy borrowed the drill to help him repair the bonnet of an MG Midget that was racing that day, although clearly not in an RGB race.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s great.

But, what happened at Mallory, I hear you ask? Well, one of you whispered it. Most importantly, I came home with the car still working. This is important because the Birkett’s in a couple of weeks and I really, really, want to do it this time. I missed out last year because Anthea was being replumbed and the year before was when I set the car on fire.

I’d signed up for the allcomers because I haven’t done a full speed lap of Mallory for over 2 years. I’d forgotten how quick it is. Although there’s essentially sod-all run-off, especially at the hairpin (top right of the track  map) it goes very quick. My FL from the weekend is an average of over 96mph.

At least, that’s the number that’s in the race results. Oddly, the data logger reckons that it’s actually a shade over 90mph. I suspect the timekeepers have got the wrong length for the circuit, or perhaps the route one takes around Mallory somehow comes out as shorter than the official length. Certainly there isn’t usually such a discrepancy.

So, I signed up for the allcomers race so as to get at least a bit of practice. However, just about everyone else in the paddock was doing the same. Qualifying was, therefore, rather busy with a whole load of MR2s, ,MG Midgets, and so on on the circuit with us. I got a 50.35 seconds which is OK, although I’d thought I might be able to get below 50s if there was a following wind. It was, though, significantly faster than the previous FL (in the class C car) of 51.84s.

That time put me 5th on the grid for the allcomers race. However, I wasn’t totally sure that I was going to do it because I didn’t want to risk bending that car at all. This is because there was an outside chance that I could end up 2nd or 3rd in the class B championship at this meeting and I didn’t want to risk that. I had worked all the numbers out and if I finished in 2nd place, which was feasible, and Tony was in 3rd then he and I would tie for 2nd place. Unfortunately, the resolution of the tie would put me in 3rd, even though I’ve beaten him on every occasion that we’ve race, because he’s got a better finishing record than me. I was really rueing those missed races at the beginning of the season while we were chasing the problems with the cat. If I’d finished those it would have been a different story.

Come RGB qualifying and things looked rather different in that it was raining rather heavily. At least it was when we got to the assembly area so I did a minimal change to the car to get it on wettish settings by just softening the dampers. I didn’t have time to adjust the ARBs. The more I think about it, it’d be a good thing to have cockput adjustable ARBs on the new car, at least so I wouldn’t have to grovel in the mud to adjust them. But then, the way I’m planning on doing them at the moment at least they’ll be fairly easy to adjust.

I didn’t do that well in RGB qualifying in that I got rather bottled up in the wet behind other people. One of my objective for next season is to be more forceful in positions like this; I should really barge past or be more positive about finding space. I’m also too gentlemanly in the race itself.

So, I ended up 9th on the grid, with a time of 62.53 seconds.

After that, we started watching the weather. Come the time for the allcomers race it was still wet so I decided not to risk things and spectated instead. Mind you, I very nearly jumped in the car and shot off when it got to be near to race time. Later on in the day though, and the weather started to clear and when RGB race time came around it was positively sunny. So, the car went back onto full-dry settings and we lined up for the start.

I got a slightly better start than usual, although still with far too much wheel spin, and set off. The race was actually quite fun in that as I’d really qualified further back that I should have done I spent most of my time getting past people (in an over-polite manner). After a while I was up to 4th place and then Steve slowed down in front of me with some mechanical malady. He was weaving a lot and I made sure I didn’t bash into him around Gerrards but got past into 3rd! Unfortunately, the fact of slowing down to make sure I didn’t come together with Steve meant that Doug got past. He’s class A so I didn’t make too big a deal of it and came home in fourth place, second in class.

Fastest lap was 50.6 seconds, comfortably faster than Tony in 3rd, but still over a second behind John which was 1st overall, as well as 1st in class. One of the best bits is that the marshalls gave me the driver of the day award (something that we arrange with  them to choose before each meeting).

There aren’t many pretty pictures in this post. However, here’s a video of the race:

(I’ve made this video rather larger than usual. Can you tell me if it’s too large for your screen? It’s hard to know how big everyone’s screens are these days.)

That all means that I end the season in 9th place overall in RGB and in 3rd place in class B. I was working it out and if I’d done those first two races at Snetterton, when the cat melted on me, I’d have finished 2nd in B, and probably in 4th overall. That’s a real bummer. Oh well.

Now racing turns to the Birkett and lots of plans are afoot for that. In the meantime, work continues slowly on the Spectre (except it’s not called that any more as Jeremy’s had a problem with the name). I’ll tell you about that next time, and hopefully put a few pictures here of Mallory.