Daytona Milton Keynes June 14th 2009
Round 5 OEKC Summer Series
Back at Milton Keynes for this round - a good entertaining track but quite challenging to overtake on.
For once the weather was unequivocally warm and sunny - even hot.
With serious money and time - having been spent on a new exhaust and the repair of the clutch we were hoping the kart would be going really well.
In practice it certainly seemed fine and although we messed around with tyre pressures we didn't really improve things much, ending up with 13 and 15psi hot and with a grid position of 8th in a time of 60.99 seconds.
Less fortunate were Amaryllis whose Saxon engine dropped a rod, so ending their racing for the day.
Thomas started the race and dropped a place to Boxed Out at the start. But the field was remaining fairly compact with the three front runners pulling away and Thomas staying well up with the second group.
He was very soon down to and below the qualifying time while defending and attacking Boxed Out and Team Sexy for position.
Eventually Team Sexy got away and Boxed Out were overcome and by now we were up to 7th and feeling comfortable with progress.
Thomas got his fastest lap of 59.87 on lap 41 - two thirds of the way through his session.
Progress up the leader board was now being rapidly achieved with 6th on lap 49, 5th on lap 51, 4th four laps later, 3rd on lap 60, 2nd was achieved on lap 62 and three laps later we were running 1st.
Part of this was due to us running a longer first session than many of the other teams - in fact we ran a few minutes longer than planned because of congestion in the fuel bay.
But we were genuinely doing well. A quick driver change and refuel was enlivened by Thomas getting his foot caught on the throttle cable as he got out of the kart. Fortunately he he also had his foot on the brake, so the kart stayed where it was.
We dropped down to 4th position after the re-fuelling but James was going reasonably well and was soon up to speed.
As with Thomas, full course yellows reduced our average speed, but apart from that and an incident when JXJ clipped the rear bumper and sent James off over the grass, lap times were pretty consistent.
The trip over the grass was just a racing accident losing us only a few seconds on that lap and doing no damage; and JXJ very kindly apologised afterwards. Very nice of them, that...
By lap 105 we were back up to 3rd again and then 20 laps later we were 2nd and James had got the fastest lap of our day at 59.59s.
Thomas called him after 132 laps and this time we had a slightly quicker changeover at 150s.
Once again the re-fuelling stop dropped us to fourth but with consistent driving in the 60s apart from the inevitable full course yellows, Thomas got us into a strong 3rd position by lap 165.
As he got towards the end of his session the rescue kart was once again out on the track, slowing the whole field down, and at that point Thomas noticed a severe engine vibration. The kart still seemed to go fine, but it wasn't worth risking blowing it up so he came into the pits.
Once there we took off the clutch drum and cover and the timing gear cover but couldn't see very much wrong apart from rather worn teeth on the water pump cog.
We put it all back together again and James went out again, but the vibration was definitely still there.
It's a bit of a mystery what is causing it; it might be the timing gears or it could be the balance shaft. In this latter case it will have to go back to the engine builder, so we rather hope that that isn't the cause.
And actually we rather hope that next time we shall have more luck with reliability! I think we're due some.......
Results are here.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g