The second round of the season was to take place at Knockhill in Scotland, our furthest venue to travel to by far. We set off on the Thursday in order to get a few miles out of the way and then picked the car up en-route on Friday morning. After a pretty nasty drive we arrived at the circuit at 6pm. Marquee up, curry and beer consumed and it was just about time for bed.
I got up very early on Saturday morning having not really slept at all. The plonker in charge of ‘Radio Knockhill’ had gone home but left all the tannoys blaring out music non-stop through the night!!! Anyway, today we had booked a little test session just to get used to the circuit again. We only had 3x 15 minute sessions in the afternoon available to us, so the morning was spent setting our gear up and doing a couple of minor jobs. The test sessions all went ok and the wet track allowed me to try out my new wet weather tyres and scrub them in. The last session waas dry enough to put on my dry weather Kumho’s and get a heat cycle through them ready for competition the next day. I was glad to have got out but the 15 minute sessions were far too short for my liking and didn’t give me enough time to sort out my lines properly. I would have to do that in the next mornings practice sessions before qualifying!! Anyway, the car was running perfectly and didn’t need anything doing to it before Sunday. Therefore we settled down to a few beers, fired up the barbie and chatted for the rest of the evening with the other competitors.
Competition day.
After a much better nights sleep I awoke and started getting ready for the day ahead. It was a very, very miserable looking morning with lots of fog and fine rain. Not what I was hoping for and I was just praying for a dry afternoon. I signed on, went to the driver briefing and collected my laptimer from TSL ready for the morning warm up. This was a wet session running my wet weather tyres so I just took it easy and learnt a bit more about the track.
A couple of hours later and it was time for practice. The weather had improved but only enough to allow a vague dry line out on track. Therefore we decided to put on the proper tyres and just be careful not too come off line to avoid getting in trouble. Again, lap times weren’t a concern for this session.
The day was running very smoothly and the qualifying session was brought forward a fair chunk. The weather was much clearer by now and the track was dry. Brilliant. I headed off out for this important, point scoring session to see what I could do. The idea was to go for as fast a lap as possible to bag 50 points and then improve on it in the final to take a further 100 points. Everything felt good during the session and I put in a decent lap and came in, having changed tyre pressures half way through to try and even out the grip. I cam in and parked up. I had set the fastest lap, a 54, but not having any driver/pit crew communication, couldn’t be made aware that another team had reacted to my time and sent out their driver again to better my lap. I was pipped by about 3/10ths in the last minute. I was a little gutted but not too worried as I still had the final to go, although I now know I really need a driver/pit crew radio system in order to be able to react to this sort of thing more efficiently.
Due to some carnage in one of the support races our finals slot got moved back a little. Luckily no more rain appeared and it was time to go out. I was feeling quite confident at this stage as I knew I had a good 1-2 seconds to reduce my time by and I had now worked out where to do it. Tyres up to temp, I set off on a fast lap. The lap was going well and I knew I was a fair chunk faster that ever before being far more aggressive. However, coming into the last turn, the hairpin, I got onto the brakes slightly too heavily over a bump in the track sending myself into a low speed spin. I ended up facing the wrong way and tried to get going but couldn’t get out of 3rd gear. I managed to get going and crawl back to the pits but knew something was badly wrong. I suspected the issue was wiring and took apart the connector going from my steering wheel paddles to my gearbox ECU. The wires had all ripped out, obviously being pulled hard when I was on full lock during my spin. I knew my weekend was over and got out of the car feeling absolutely gutted as I knew what could have been. Unfortunately I hadn’t really set any other decent times during the final as this was my first proper lap. This left me in fifth which now translates to me being in 2nd place in the championship overall…just.
Once again, the car ran perfectly all weekend and I think we must have been the only team who didn’t need to do anything at all apart from changing wheels and feeding it V-Power!!!
So, apart from an hour or so required to fix my wiring I’m ready for the next round. Brands Hatch is on the 8th July and I am hoping for a good result there to hopefully get me back in top spot. Fingers crossed.
Here’s a link to a bit of track action including my little spin.
