Buckmore Park; March 3rd 2002
Final position: 4th Clubman, 13th Overall.
The first race of the Championship and we turned up in good time for the two hour practice session that preceded it to find a dry track with a promise of some good sunshine later on in the day.
Having weighed ourselves extremely carefully after the debacle at Clay last month, Thomas went out first to test kart and track, but was caught out by cold tyres on the fast downhill right hander by the pits and reversed at high speed into the tyre wall. The back bumper bent badly, but luckily, with the Promax engine, it is so far away from the rear wheel that it didn't make contact with the tyre and he was able to continue.
James went out next but after only a few laps the brakes began to heat up, and the new pads began to bind. So the brakes got hotter and began to bind more... and so on until James realised there was something seriously wrong and limped back to the pits.
While Thomas and James replaced the boiled brake fluid and re-adjusted the callipers, Richard attacked the back bumper.
We lost about half an hour, before Richard could go out and try some different set-ups and then qualify with some new tyres, achieving 19th place on the grid with a time of 45.56s.
We were badly pushed for time by this stage - the one day structure of this year's races probably means that race days will be more pressurised - but we got Richard organised and on the grid just in time .
He had a good start making up three places on the first lap and then settling down to a steady slog up the field circulating consistently in the mid 45s and having a lengthy battle with CSF.
On lap 25 he got our fastest lap of the race at 44.98s. After 35 minutes some of the teams were beginning to pit and we were listed as 10th.
James jumped in after a rapid re-fuelling only to be stopped by the Race Director because the weights were held on by only one R clip instead of two. After some faffing around the only solution was to take off one of the weights which meant that he would be underweight by the time he had used all his fuel.
But now on the track, he was circulating steadily if slowly, his fastest lap being 46.11secs.
In these circumstances the only thing to do was to bring James in again after only 20 minutes when he still had plenty of fuel, and luckily he made the minimum weight.
Thomas took over and after the first few laps got down to the mid 45s again.
But then he had two bits of bad luck. The first was on the hairpin after the pits straight when he chanced his arm in a five kart mêlée and got punted off - not really his fault - and then the engine took some time to get going again.
Then bad luck struck again in the form of Soco McGee who turned left into the pits from the right of the racing line at high speed, without advance warning directly in front of Tom. The resulting collision was inevitable and the hand signals from Soco totally unreasonable, but fortunately although Thomas was left facing the wrong way on the track on the fastest and most hidden part of the circuit, neither kart was damaged and he was able to get going again very quickly.
After about 45mins the sun was disappearing and black clouds were coming in. We left Thomas out for a bit longer in case it started raining but it soon became apparent that the fuel would run out first so we brought him in.
Richard went out again, driving well with lap times a fraction slower than before. The idea had been that he should stay out for 50mins or so, but he got cramp in his arms and after about 35mins came in to hand over to James once again.
With an additional small weight on board we reckoned that we could keep him out there for about half an hour and this time James drove a bit faster finally getting down into the 45s for a couple of laps.
Meanwhile Barry Prosser was seen by everyone other than the drivers to be getting increasingly agitated about overtaking under yellow flags, and a dozen laps into James' drive he put out full course yellows to slow the race down for a couple of laps while a kart was collected from the infield. Titan Motorsport took this opportunity to overtake....................
Throughout the race we had been around the 10th to 13th position and as Thomas took over for the final 53 minutes we were 11th although the picture was still confused, with different teams having different pit stop strategies.
Once again he found himself following CSF and finally managed to overtake them on the track although they were several laps ahead. In fact they were far enough ahead to be able to do their final pit stop with only half an hour to go and still stay in front to finish two laps ahead of us.
In the final minutes of the race Moss Racing squeezed past to take the 3rd Clubman position with Roker Racing in 2nd.
Full race results are available here.
In retrospect we had a great time, the kart went really well and the engine was brilliant. Next time we can/will get a better result ..............
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g