Racing at Silverstone

Well, it was back to Silverstone again for the club’s annual August bank holiday meeting. At this meeting all the club’s formulae are racing so it’s pretty packed and hard to see how they could run it anywhere other than at Silverstone due to the amount of space available there. Problem is, it’s a completely awful circuit for spectating at. I did rather well here last year so it’d be nice to do reasonably well again.

This photo was taken by Mark <something or other> who’s talking about coming racing with is. I’ve shamelessly nicked it off his on-line photos, I hope he doesn’t mind. 🙂 (You might also be able to tell that I washed the car before the race!)

The weekend started for us with the drive to Silverstone on the Thursday evening, as I was testing on the Saturday. However, there was a race meeting taking place and we had to spend the night in the car park outside the circuit. Of course, if I’d read the testings finals that the club had sent me, I’d have been expecting that. Still, it all worked all right and we got into the circuit at 0730 the next day.

I had been a bit unsure about whether going testing was a good idea, but in retrospect I think it was useful. The big problem was that there were lots of things like stock hatches on the circuit and as the day wore on they got more numerous and seemed less and less able to look in their mirrors. This photo gives an idea what it was like. The wall of cars in front is more reminiscent of the Birkett than a usual test day.

The problem on this day was that many of those hatches were effectively racing each other and completely messing up lap after lap after lap for people like me. In fact, I got tired of it and sold my last session to Andy Grant.

Before the weekend, my fastest lap under race-like conditions was 1:06.82 from qualifying last year. (The race itself was wet, so not representative.) I didn’t manage to improve on that time during testing, as I just didn’t get a clear lap the whole day. I did, though, improve the theoretical fastest lap, from 1:06.38 to 1:05.97. That is, I put in some faster sector times than I’d managed before which should be good.

At the end of the day, I got the car scrutineered as they were allowing us to get this done a day before which was very useful. The scrutineer remarked that my helmet was looking a bit bashed up, which is probably correct. So, as we were at Silverstone I went to GPR and bought a new one. Expensive business, motor racing, but it’s probably best not to save money on safety kit.

Race day dawned bright and clear, which was a relief as the forecast hadn’t been too good. Come qualifying time I got near the front of the queue which gave me a relatively decent set of clear laps in qualifying. I managed to get in a 1:06.57 which was good enough for 13th on the grid, 8th in class. OK but not good really. I’m sure I could have gone quicker. I need to get my head around going really quickly for a single lap, I’m still no good at that… One problem, though, was that the gearbox was clearly not too happy. It jumped out of gear a couple of times, and refused to go in on several others. Clearly, I’m going to have to do something about this.

When the race came around, the weather was still fine. I was directly behind Andy Grant on the grid which was a shame, I’m sure I’m quicker than him. That’s Andy in the white car in front of me.

When the lights went out I was almost caught napping and made a pretty gruesome start with far too much wheelspin. Phil passed me on the way down to Copse as well. But I managed to pass Andy when he left the door WIDE open at Becketts and outbraked Phil at Brooklands. So, I finished the first lap in pretty much the position I started in. I’m not too sure what happened to Andy and Phil after this as I didn’t see them again.

Then I was in a battle which lasted the whole race and was great fun. There was a train of me, Henry, Colin, Al (who’d stalled on the grid and was making his way forwards) and David. We swapped places several times although I mostly just watched from the rear. I was having more and more trouble with my gearbox and on the couple of occasions when I did make progress I was knocked back again. If you click on the photo on the left you’ll get a snippet of video which neatly summarises the problem. In fact, at the end of the race, I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d even manage to get to the finish line. But, I actually made up three places on the last lap as Henry spun and Colin and David managed to hustle each other off into the Brooklands gravel. Thanks chaps!

So, I finished in 9th place, 4th in class. I’ll take it but it was rather lucky really…

Now I’ve got a couple of things to fix. The first is the gearbox which is made rather tricky by Andy going off on his summer holidays! Also, the damper that sprung a leak at Brands earlier in the year seems to be leaking again. Having had it rebuilt I’m not too pleased about that. I’ll phone Protech and see what they say about it.

Problem is, I haven’t got long before the meeting at Oulton Park…