Whilton Mill July 1st 2007
Round 5 OEKC Summer Series
After missing Round 4 in June and dropping off the lead in the Championship we were keen to do well in this round and catch up on the competition again.
The weather forecast for Sunday had been unequivocally wet for days - at best light rain from 9 o'clock onwards.
But at 8 o'clock as Thomas arrived from Cambridge and James from London, it was windy but dry with wet patches on the track.
As we prepared the kart it did rain heavily for a few minutes and we put on wets ready for practice.
The first few laps of showed that unless it rained again soon, we would be much faster on slicks and with the rest of the grid, we swapped tyre types as James took over from Thomas.
The circuit was now a mixture of grippy dry and very slippery wet as James proved to himself by going off sideways at the end of the Start/Finish straight and coming back on over the kerb at the Crook. He managed to miss the tyre wall but the kerb dislodged the exhaust mount making the rest of that lap extremely noisy.
We qualified on the second row behind the Biland of Red Mist and the Rotaxes of Box Tech and Le Maverick, with the kart set up in the expectation that we would soon be back in the pits changing to wets as the rain came down
The sun came out.
The start went reasonably well and James was instantly pressuring Le Maverick for third. He got it after a couple of laps and began to draw away from them and Red Max as he settled down to catch up with Box Tech in front.
Inexplicably (to James, that is) Box Tech stayed well in front and began to disappear off into the distance. At the same time James began to be attacked again by the following karts until in desperation he tried a tighter line on the Crook, hit a wet patch just as a hesitant engine came back on song and slid onto the grass and through a puddle. He didn't stop, but it seemed to take a long time for the tyres to clean themselves again.
By this time Le Maverick and Red Max were well away and however hard he tried, James found he went on slipping back.
There was no doubt that the kart was seriously off the pace and the poor engine pick up out of the corners was making life difficult.
To cap it all James started to suffer once again from his own lurgy and began to feel sick.
The sun shined, there was no sign of rain and James' times remained at the wrong end of 43s.
He was glad to come in at the end of his drive and in an attempt to get the kart working properly we took out the front bar and reduced the pressures in the front tyres, but they were already showing a lot of wear.
Thomas immediately went better getting down into the 42s and achieving a best of 42.22 on lap 122.
But he was still off the pace, despite fighting strongly with Le Maverick and Red Max as they came past.
After a generous 66 minutes James signalled him in for fuel and a driver change. But James wasn't really feeling well enough and it was with some relief that he agreed with Thomas' suggestion that we do the rest of the race as a test session.
So that is what we did, making a number of changes throughout the afternoon. A bigger jet seemed to improve the engine, without actually making it go like a rocket and although changes to the chassis set up made it easier to drive Thomas was unable to go faster than his earlier fastest lap.
Meanwhile, whatever we did with the tyre pressures, the fronts continued to look awful while the rears remained smooth and uninvolved despite getting very hot.
About 45 minutes from the end of the race, it finally started to rain and we put on some old wets to see if we could learn anything about the wet set up.
But it wasn't long before the rain got really serious and the track flooded. There seemed to be no advantage in Thomas contracting pneumonia, so we brought him in and called it a day.
Inevitably we came last and the post race post mortem decide that we had cooked the front tyres in the first few laps by having too high pressures.
We certainly hope that that's the cause and that we can get the kart working well again at Milton Keynes in August.
Definitely one of our less good races, but on the plus side at least we didn't do any damage - except to our own pride.
Here are the full results. Here's hoping for a bigger grid next time; and here's Gary's report of the race.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g