Whilton Mill September 7th 2008
Round 6 OEKC Summer Series
The forecast was for rain pretty much all day and certainly when we arrived the track was very wet. But the weather forecast has been wrong so many times at Whilton in the past that we couldn't really make any assumptions.
We put on an old set of wets for practice, with a new set standing by for the race itself, and with a new set of slicks ready in case the rain never materialised and the track dried out.
We were just about ready for the start of practice and hit the starter button to fire up the engine on the stand - nothing! Absolutely no response from the starter motor at all. We thought it had to be a poor connection somewhere so spent a lot of time searching and testing for that before coming to the conclusion that it must be a dead starter motor.
Chris from TT Sport lent us a starter to motor to see if that worked - and it did - so James went off to buy a new one from KKC while Chris very kindly helped Thomas strip down the motor to get the starter off.
With Chris' help we got the kart ready for the start of the race, but we had of course missed all of practice and would have to start at the back of the grid.
James was to drive the first stint and not having had any practice was keen not to throw away all the hard work that Thomas had done to get the engine working again. So he made a fairly conservative start while he sorted out what he could and couldn't do with the kart.
Added to which it was now raining very hard, making visibility very limited.
For a number of laps he got stuck behind Red Mist Racing but finally got past at the end of the hill.
After that he was operating more or less in free air. TT Sport came past going just a shade quicker after a slow start, and James had a notable couple of laps against KKC where positions changed several times over a couple of laps but he eventually got past and away.
The rain had now stopped but there was still a lot of surface water and the track didn't appear to be drying out much.
James got up to sixth within twenty or so laps and then up to fifth for he last twenty laps of his drive. Both chassis and engine were performing well and he didn't seem to be giving anything much away to the opposition.
After 67 minutes Thomas brought him in for the driver change and more fuel. This was OK without being spectacularly fast.
The stop dropped us to sixth again for about a lap before Thomas got going moving us rapidly into third position, with his lap times improving as the track now started to dry noticeably.
Thomas kept up a good speed but at the same time was trying hard to conserve the wet weather tyres that were going to wear out if there wasn't more rain soon.
We dropped back to fourth for a few laps and then moved on up to second for the remaining time of Thomas' drive.
On lap 129, which proved to be his last lap Thomas got our fastest lap of the race at 58.58s.
James was now ready to takeover for his second drive and had just come back to the pit wall to signal Thomas in after 66 minutes when when he found that the kart was no longer on track.
Eventually he located it at the beginning of the hill and took the trolley over there. In Thomas' words the engine had just gone "ping!" and that was that and the end of our race.
Once we had taken the engine off we could see that the con rod had made an attempt to break free from the crankcase - which was now cracked and bulging out.
Normally this would be the end of the engine, but Steve Ogden who had rebuilt the engine at the end of last year is going to have a look at it and see what he can do for us. So the engine has gone back to him and will, we hope be ready for the next round on October 19th.
We were disappointed not to finish but pleased that both kart and drivers seemed competitive having raced so little this year. The results will follow later. Interestingly as we stopped, the track was just about dry enough for slicks and in retrospect this would have been the time to make the change to them if we had still been racing. It didn't in fact rain again, but it was by no means certain we would have had the courage to swap to slicks at that moment.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g