Whilton Mill May 11th 2008
Round 3 OEKC Summer Series
This was our first race in five months since December and since Thomas went down with labyrinthinitis, so to say we were apprehensive would be a bit of an understatement. We had had a test day a couple of weeks before, which had gone reasonably well and served to prove that Thomas was well enough to drive as well as enabling us to do some useful work on setup.
It looked as if it was going to be a warm day with forecast temperatures up into the mid 20°s or more so no easy ride from that point of view.
We put on new tyres for practice and Thomas got them up to temperature and scrubbed in with pressures at 12psi before James went out to set a time.
The first change was to go further out on the front, and this worked well with the lap times now coming down into the 49s and looking competitive against other teams. A further change of putting in the front bar, brought nothing to the party and we took it out again. By this time were had set a qualifying time and so we decided to return to our pit to get the kart ready for the start of the race.
James was to start and found that he had qualified rather low down on the grid in 10th place - we had set our qualifying time with the less good setup. We are never too worried about grid positions however as we normally go backwards at the start as the fastest drivers blast off into the distance.
However, we also try and make the best we can out of any situation and at the start James found clear air in front of him and by the time he reached the uphill straight he was up into 5th. An aggressive overtaking manoeuvre on the approach to Inkermans got him to 4th and an off-road experiment by KKC promoted us to 3rd.
James was finding the kart would turn in reliably and consistently and for the first time for many races he was able to push hard. Only the start of the Boot was a bit of a lottery.
Having been challenging for 2nd, we now dropped back a bit. This was either James tiring and losing some of the adrenalin of the start or possibly the tyres not working so well at the higher temperatures. The handling of the kart was still good but other teams were now challenging from behind and TT Sport came past, followed by Box Tech and Red Max.
On lap 28 James got our fastest lap of the race at 49.76. That's not what the final results say, but we'll come to that in a minute.
The engine was working well for the most part - except at the end of the uphill section, where it seemed to seriously run out of top speed. James found he was unable to overtake anybody here, whereas it seemed very easy for anybody to overtake us! A jetting issue was probably the culprit, just preventing us from revving a bit higher.
With James now lapping in the 50s mainly, apart from a mistake on lap 64 which lost us two or three seconds as James went much too wide through Chapman, we seemed to have settled safely into sixth.
After seventy laps and some sixty minutes Thomas flagged James in for the first driver change and more fuel.
But as James stopped on the weighbridge the clutch failed to release and the engine stalled. This lost us a few seconds (in general our pit changes were OK without being very special) but fortunately the clutch released again, although there was obviously something wrong with it.
Refuelling was successful and Thomas departed having spent 132s in the pit and on the out lap.
This was the real test now for Thomas with the sun blazing down, but in fact he was doing really well, lapping consistently in the 51s and getting down to the 50s on occasions.
Meanwhile in the pits, James was recovering, getting the fuel and whatever else ready for the next changeover and wondering how it was we were now credited with 11th place. He couldn't work out how were two laps down on the leaders.
Eventually he found Chris York and in discussion found that the computer had crashed momentarily and although it had seemed to recover everything satisfactorily after a reboot, it had lost its fastest time league table and also lost one of our laps. Chris looked through all his print-outs to establish this and having done so, added a lap back into our tally promoting us rapidly up the field to 5th.
Our position fluctuated over the next 45mins but by the time James signalled for Thomas to come in again after a bit under 70mins of driving we had once again got to 5th.
The changeover was 4s slower this time as the engine fired once on re-start and then died. For a moment it looked as if it was going to give up for the day, but then started once again and James was off.
The kart was still going well but James was unable to get down into the 49s again. He felt he should have been able to, and we wonder if we should have dropped the tyre pressures a couple of psi.
Apart from that he was doing OK and having dropped a place to 6th in the changeover was fairly soon back into 5th again where he stayed for most of his drive.
Towards the end of his session we made up quite a few places and we hit 2nd as Thomas brought him in for what was scheduled to be the final changeover after 67min driving time.
This time James was concentrating on not letting the engine die on the weighbridge so instead managed to get the kart off-centre. Having corrected that and found that we weren't after all underweight and after suffering once again from the engine not being terribly keen to get on with it once Thomas was ready, we completed the pit stop in 145s.
Immediately it was apparent that Thomas was pretty tired. His neck was suffering from strain and he was obviously having difficulty keeping his head up.
But he continued on, consolidating the 4th place we had after the re-fuelling.
It seemed pretty probable that James would have to take over again at some point, but it wasn't in fact for another 48mins before Thomas signalled that he had done enough.
With no need to refuel, the stop and out lap was only 103s and James set about trying to work out why he couldn't get into the 49s again. This rapidly brought him up behind Ministry of Speed who was just a bit too quick at the end of the straight for James to overtake there - or anywhere else for that matter.
The Ministry finally decided that all this was a bit dangerous in the dying minutes of the race and finally waved James through just at the moment when James wasn't on his back bumper. James then made a complete pig's ear of the next two corners and the Ministry came past again.
James decided to take the hint, stay out of trouble and sit in their slipstream to the end.
It was the right decision as Saxon hit a problem and retired so giving us third position as the flag came down.
It was an excellent race and we were very pleased with what we had achieved. This was our fifth podium place in the last five races and Thomas doesn't reckon his neck is a problem he can't overcome once again.
The clutch turned out to have eaten one of the washers on the pin end and wrecked the pads in the process as well as having cracked the clutch drum - so we were quite lucky to get to the end with it in that condition. Other than that the brake continues to work well apart from the fact that it binds too much and that, combined with the lack of top end from the engine, was really hurting our outright top speed.
Results are here.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g