Soaked and battered in Oulton Park

The new race year started with a rare trip to Oulton Park. We don’t go very often because you can only run a single day meeting at Oulton (something to do with the locals being able to hear a circuit five miles away when all 15 of them are going to church). Although scheduled to be on the longest version of the circuit we were on the Island circuit instead due to some uncompleted works.

I had a test half day organised on the Friday so we traipsed up to Oulton on the Thursday and set up in the paddock. I’d managed to squeeze in a short test day at Donington Park a couple of weeks previous to this. Over the winter I’d managed to do quite a lot of the stuff I talked about a while ago and, most importantly, the car was now significantly lighter than it was last year.

At the test Al had driven my car and we’d managed to improve the handling significantly. As such, I was looking forward to seeing how the car went at Oulton. The only problem was that the weather was predicted to be OK on Friday but horrible on Saturday. All the same, the test sessions went well and I got to a setup that I sort of liked, although well aware that it could well be a waste of time.

As predicted, though, Saturday looked really horrible at  the start of the day, although it was predicted to improve later in the day. So, I got stuck in to completely changing the setup, fitting the wet tyres (the ones that were hardly used last year) and completely removing the ARBs. Come qualifying time I set out in the pouring rain and went around pretty quickly. In fact, at the first experience of the Avon wet tyres under these conditions was that they were working really well. The main problem was my new helmet was misting up terribly and in fact I’d decided to come in because visibility was so bad just as they put the chequered flag out.

At the end of quali I was in 7th place for the first race and 8th for the second. The times were 1:47.61 and 1:49.67. As you can see from the times most of only managed one half decent lap due to the track conditions and the many much slower cars.

So, come the first race and the weather was still horrible. That was a relief because it meant I could leave the car setup alone.

The first race was quite fun. I got a decent start and was keeping Paul behind me. However, we then came up to Knickerbrook and Olly and Dan were right on the start of the chicane tangled up. I made the wrong choice and went around them on the left and Paul went around them on the right. Unfortunately, that meant he was now in front of me. Barring much faffing about that was pretty much how it ended up. However, as the track tried the tyres started working less well. I now realise, with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, that I should have been searching out the wettest bits of the track to keep the tyres cool.

At the end of the race I was 6th, benefiting from the number of people that had fallen off along the way. Anyway, here’s the video:

Later in the day it dried up a lot for the second race and I changed the car’s setup back to how it had been the day before. I think we were all looking forward to a race at proper, RGB, speed.

However, it didn’t turn out that way. The race was red-flagged on the second lap due to a fairly large coming together at Lodge. This was caused, based on looking at the videos later on, by people just being too racey. So, after a long delay, we lined up again only for the red flags to come out again. This time, the race was abandoned due to the amount of time we’d spent on track and the lateness of the hour. The red flag was caused by someone falling off onto the grass and, dim-wittedly, keeping their foot on the loud pedal and spearing back onto the track into someone else. It pretty much totalled two cars which wasn’t really very impressive.

So, that was the end of the first race meeting. Good in parts is, I guess, the final comment…