After the engine seized at the last race Gary Munro diagnosed a broken piston ring as the cause. This should be a warranty job but at the same time we decided to change the con rod to be on the safe side. So we had a pretty much completely re-built engine once again. This time we hoped it would stay together.
Weather was good - blustery (blustery enough to destroy our awning, a little later on) with clouds and not much blue sky. Good racing weather, really.
We were using the tyres from the previous race, so we just concentrated on getting the engine run in safely.
The Alfano still wasn't working so TT Sport very kindly lent us a replacement sensor - and once again we had lap times!
Thomas went out first in practice and after some worrying moments as the choke stuck on, the engine was going well.
He handed over to James for qualifying who managed an unimpressive 60.64s good enough only for the back of the grid.
We changed the jetting to 162 for a bit more top end and pushed James to the dummy grid ready for the first 66 minutes racing.
Off the line, James initially lost places but then got past Appliance and RKC to get us into 9th.
But by this time everyone else had disappeared into the distance and James was driving a lonely race.
Or he was until Appliance came past again on lap 15.
James wasn't going well having difficulty getting into the low 60s let alone anything better and was unable to seriously challenge Appliance again.
Finally he had a half spin at hairpin at the bottom of the main straight and Appliance were gone.
It felt as if we had got the kart going again only to lose our ability to drive it!
But James was now beginning to speed up getting more consistently into the 59s and on lap 32 we were back to 9th - due to someone's mishap we guess.
We had to wait to lap 44 to move up another place but then we got 7th on lap 53 and 6th three laps later.
On lap 62 James got the best lap of his session at 59.50s which coincided with moving into 5th.
As Thomas signalled him in after 66 minutes driving we were credited with 4th.
Things were looking up and we did a good pit stop and driver change in 146s, though we were delayed momentarily as the weighbridge marshal stopped us to tell us were dead on the weight limit at 175kg.
Thomas was out now in 8th place but rapidly moved up the field so that by the time he got under 60s on lap 76 we were back up to 4th.
3rd followed a couple of laps later and 2nd on lap 84 with Stannion Slicks and TT Sport a bit behind. And Box Tech about a lap ahead.
He then came up behind Boxed Out and was beginning to get within challenging distance when TT Sport's kart had to be rescued from the infield and a period of full course yellows ensued.
This enabled Thomas to close right up to Boxed Out but it also enabled Boxed out to join the back of another bunch of karts.
As we started racing again everyone was trying hard to make up places. Boxed out made good progress and Thomas was trying hard to keep tabs on them.
Unfortunately a dive down the inside at the second hairpin couldn't quite be made to stick and Thomas was off.
Only a few seconds lost but we were down to 3rd and then a little later to 4th, but not before he had set his best lap to match that of James' at 59.50s
In general the kart seemed to be going well though our impression was that we lacked the ultimate top speed on the straight of some of the karts.
In the pits James had decided that being dead on the weight limit was too risky, so he added another half kilo of lead to the seat insert.
Thomas had prepared the wet tyres during the first session, but despite it looking a bit gloomy, rain had never really threatened.
As the race progressed, Thomas began to claw back places achieving 3rd on lap 124 and then 2nd again on lap 131.
Congestion in the pit lane persuaded the pit crew to keep Thomas out a bit longer than planned which was no bad thing as Thomas put in four storming laps and we were running in 1st place.
Another neat changeover in exactly the same time as the first one got us out into 2nd place with Box Tech still in front.
This session James seemed to wake up a bit and was definitely going faster despite a piece of gravel in the seat proving surprisingly painful and difficult to dispose of!
When the Swiss Auto kart of MTR blasted past at the end of the straight he more or less stayed with them, finding them much faster on the straight but comparable in speed everywhere else.
He wasn't going to be able to challenge them again, however, unless they made a mistake and eventually they pulled away.
James was going much better now and was beginning to enjoy himself.
On lap 161 he knocked almost a second off his best time in the previous session with 58.56s lap.
But two laps later having just gone round the corner at the top of the hill there was an odd tinkling noise and as he approached the bottom of the descent James realised he had no brakes.
He managed that left hander and the hairpin at the bottom of the straight, albeit rather messily and then cruised warily back to the pits.
We found that the centre of the disc had sheared off leaving just the outside ring intact and bouncing around on the axle.
We couldn't work out how this could have happened until we realised that the axle must have moved putting intolerable pressure on the disc against the pads. But it can only have moved by a tiny amount as the drive sprocket was fine and unharmed. So a bit of a weakness in the disc assembly, we guess. We have an old disk from the 7kart which Thomas reckons will fit and we'll get some plastics inserts machined to go inside the axle to give the grub screws on the bearings something to tighten onto.
But apart from all this an axle moving against the brake pads can't have done our speed any good.
But now there was nothing worthwhile that we could do so we packed up, compressed the wrecked awning into an easily managed lump for disposal and had a coffee while we waited for the race to finish so that we could leave the circuit.
Results are here. The Box Tech Teams won 1st, 2nd and 3rd. A wonderful achievement for the team - many congratulations to them.