West country madness

So, finally in this sequence of race reports we head west to Castle Combe. I wasn’t able to test before this meeting and we also had two races in one day so it was going to be quite fraught. We last raced at Combe in 2007 so my memories of the circuit were quite poor. Very fast and very little run off is what I remember.

So, after the usual morning stuff of signing on, etc., we lined up for qualifying. When we were last here I was in the old class C Fury. The fastest lap back then was 1:19.54 although that’s perhaps not too fair because qualifying was wet and the race was the only time I was on the track when it was dry. (This was before testing became de rigeur.)

Before Combe, and as a result of the obviously changed rear downforce, I made some significant suspension changes. I modified the bellcrank angles and changed all the spring rates. I also replaced that broken bracket with something rather more substantial, as in the photo.

So, qualifying was really about learning the circuit. I’d spent a lot of time before the race watching videos of Castle Combe but it still took time to relate the circuit to what was in the videos. It’s a measure of how much faster RGB is now than it was then that I exceeded my fastest lap from 2007 by the third lap of qualifying. I ended up with a time of 1:12.59. Again to put it in context, this is about half a second quicker than the outright fastest lap in 2007. What’s more, that lap was in an old class A car which has a lot more power than a current RGB car with a 1300cc ZX-13 engine rather than the current 1 litre engines.

Of course, the problem is that as essentially every lap in qualifying was faster than the previous one the next fastest lap was a significant amount slower. So, I was 15^th and 17^th on the grid in the two races.

The first start was, yet again, OK but not brilliant and we headed up the hill to Quarry. (Top right of the map above.)I was side by side with Mark into the first of the chicanes, the Esses, only to find that Jonathan had sideswiped the tyres, in a manner that I still don’t understand, and we all had to pick our way through. In the process I snuck past Colin in a slightly dubious move. After that I got stuck behind a warring pair of MNRs who were also being held up by David who’d apparently broken his clutch cable. All the same we had fun until Dave, one of the MNRs spun at Camp and I got past him and David in the melée.

Here’s the video:

At some point while I was driving around I saw my number in lights on the start finish line. Later on it turned out that I had been penalised by 5 seconds for a track limits excursion. That meant I finished in 11^th place, 9^th in class. Frustratingly behind David because of the penalty. Watch the video and work out where I was a bad boy…

Fastest lap in the race was 1:11.34, possibly as a result of some suspension tweaks I did after qualifying. This time is now nearly 2 seconds quicker than that old class A time and the blokes at the front are going another second or so faster. Not sure I really understand this…

Later on it was time for race 2, here’s the video:

Pretty much the most obvious feature of this race is the oil being chucked out of Jonathan’s car. I’m really rather bemused by the fact that the clerk managed to penalise me 5 seconds for a minor track offense but can’t manage to black-and-orange flag a car that is pumping out prodigious quantities of oil onto me, the track and me and everyone else’s tyres and brakes. What’s more, the fact that it’s being vapourised indicates an extreme fire risk. As you can tell, I’m not amused.

Pity that…