Whilton Mill February 1st 2009
Round 1 OEKC Summer Series
The forecast was for real temperatures of about zero with it feeling like near -6°C. Any snow wasn't due until the evening, but it certainly felt cold enough when we arrived in the half dark of the early morning.
Most of the work had been done on the kart the day before, so we didn't have much to do other than watch the officials struggle with the weighbridge. In the end we gave up and went off to drivers briefing.
Thomas went out first in practice to warm up the tyres, and found that the engine was missing slightly on parts of the track. A bigger jet cured that and then we played around with tyre pressures ending up with 16psi on the rear which we only decided on, after James had qualified us in ninth on the grid.
At the start James held on to his place and on lap 12 got our fastest lap of the race at 49.26s
Once again the brake failed after half a dozen laps, the travel increasing enormously so that for a moment there seemed to be no braking at all.
In fact James found that there was some still, and since the same thing had happened in the previous race, James was fairly unworried about it.
Once he had got used to it, that is....
But after that he began to drop back slightly and gradually slipped down the running order.
In the process he executed a neat 360° non stopping spin on the uphill straight as he momentarily got onto the grass.
However as the session went on he did start to make headway, even if only because other teams broke down. By lap 65 we were up to sixth.
But now the problem was that James was suffering from sickness and was in danger of throwing up. He slowed right down and on his final lap after Thomas had signalled him in he had to stop out on the track in order to recover.
As Thomas raced across the circuit with the rescue trolley James recovered, completed the lap and came into the pits for fuel and the driver change to Thomas, who had just completed his first 4 minute mile - pushing a trolley!
The stop was completed reasonably well, but that and James' unscheduled stop had dropped us right down to 10th again.
Thomas had a lot to make up, but quickly got the measure of the kart and started to move up the field despite a couple of very slow laps in the middle. Did he come off? The pit crew didn't see anything....and neither did Thomas, so something seems to have gone wrong with the timing system.
On lap 103 - his 29th lap - he attained his fastest time of 49.45s as he moved from 8th though 7th and immediately on to 6th once again.
In general, like James he was finding the going pretty tough with the increased cornering forces generated by the stickier tyres and the kart bouncing around more than we were used to.
Toward the end of his stint - James was keeping him out for as long as he dared - it began to snow, and although it wasn't settling and wasn't very hard it was making the track progressively wetter.
Lap times dropped and the pit crew got the wet tyres ready for the fuel stop.
Thomas came in having got up to fifth and we changed tyres, re-fuelled, bled the brakes (to no great effect, it has to be said) and got James out there again.
He was appreciating the easier driving conditions in the wet and for the first time in the day was enjoying himself - he probably would not have felt well enough to go out again if it had still been dry.
We dropped to sixth again in the pit stop but were soon back in 6th and then rapidly into 4th where James stayed for the rest of his session as he made inroads into the lead of the kart ahead.
Unfortunately the track was drying out much too quickly and the tyres were shredding themselves badly.
Although we knew from past experience that these wets would operate well as slicks for quite a long time once all the tread had worn off, James slowed a little to give them an easier time - and him for that matter; the stomach was rebelling once again.
At the next change we swapped the tyres once more back to slicks, this time with lower tyre pressures by a couple of psi. But we were delayed by an almost flat battery.
Thomas was soon circulating rapidly and consistently and he had hung on to 4th place - it looked as if we might get on the podium yet!
But on his 12th lap he came in with a loose fuel tank; the retaining knob had come off. KKC kindly provided a new one and he was away again - or would have been if the battery hadn't flattened even more. Eventually it turned the engine over just enough to start the engine and Thomas was off.
He was out for just long enough to get back to fifth having dropped to sixth when the engine stopped with a totally dead battery.
This time TT Sport came to the rescue with a replacement and we also changed the brake pads to bigger ones at the same time. But we had got dumped down to 7th in the time that all this took and there was little Thomas could do about it.
However the brakes were working better with the bigger pads, so that's a useful improvement to have discovered.
So seventh is where we finished. A difficult race and physically very hard. Both drivers need to get fitter for the next round on March 1st at Milton Keyes.
Here are the results.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g