Llandow Rounds 5 & 6; June 23rd 2002
Finishing positions:
Round 5: 19th overall and 10th in Clubmans
Round 6: 20th overall and 10th in Clubmans
In one respect at least this is James' favourite race of the year, since the Llandow racetrack is only ten minutes away from his house.
So we felt we had got off to a good start when we arrived at the circuit feeling relaxed and confident at just before eight. However, it soon became clear that practically every other team had spent some pretty useful time testing at the circuit the day before.
We were looking for times consistently in the mid 39s to be really competitive but having set ourselves up in the excellent covered pits and got out on the track we were struggling at about a second off our target. Only Thomas was able to get below 40 seconds and then only once. Nothing identifiably wrong with the chassis or engine and by and large we were all roughly in the same speed bracket.
We dropped the tyre pressures and then moved the seat back. After that we moved the seat forward again. Nothing made a huge amount of difference and any improvement we were getting was probably due as much to improved driving than to improved handling.
Still we didn't have to worry about the weather as once again the synergy between the Robinson family and Wales had produced a clean sunny day with a bit of a breeze.
Thomas qualified us (not quite) on the back row at 19th in a very good time of 39.885 and then Richard started Round 5 for us.
Amazingly on this tight and twisty track everyone got through the first couple of laps without crashing and Richard set about trying to move up the field. But it was obvious that we were just a few tenths of a second off the pace of those directly in front of us and apart from picking up places where others dropped out, we were moving down not up.
On lap 8 he got our fastest lap of the race at 40.133
For the first time it was necessary and possible to use the pit board to organise exactly when we came in for re-fuelling and we showed the red to Richard for a couple of laps before bringing him in for rapid changeover to James.
The field was more mixed up by now and we think its possible that James may even have overtaken a couple of karts but on average he was lapping .167 seconds slower than Richard overall.
Again we kept him out for an extra lap while the refuelling bay cleared and then another lap while James worked out what the pit signals meant but then there was a good smooth change to Thomas for his first stint.
Unfortunately it didn't last as long as it should have done. After about half an hour Thomas disappeared only to re-appear at a limping place as he came back into the pits. Luckily we remembered to re-fuel him so we had by now completed all the necessary re-fuelling stops.
Apparently he had let SZR and ZLK past who had then crashed directly in front of him and Tom unavoidably smacked straight into them at high speed.
The most obvious damage was a bent track rod which we attacked with a hammer. This was fine and Tom went out again - and then came straight back in again: we had failed to notice that the steering column was bent.
No problem - get a new one off Ted - except that one of the improvements the Wright R2 chassis has over our R1 is that the steering column is thicker!. So back to the big hammer until it had been bludgeoned more or less straight - or rather the bends in one direction were cancelled out by bends in the other direction.
All done and we changed the track rod for a new one at the same time. By this time we had given up on the race and were just aiming to get in a lap at the very end to get the finishing points.
But we hadn't finished yet! When we tried to set the tracking it was obvious that the stub axle was bent; we had already tried to get a replacement from Ted but he didn't have one, and the MS version didn't quite fit. So again the hammer was brought into use. In the middle of this Jeff Johnson very kindly came up with a new one and having installed an extra long track rod to get the tracking roughly right, at last we got Thomas out for the last few minutes of the race.
So we now had an hour to sort the kart out before qualifying for Round 6. We decided that the front end was now too much of a mix and mismatch so we put on last year's plug-ins and stub axles and with advice from Graham at CSF cured what had looked like a bent chassis by moving the rear axle fractionally.
Then we moved the seat back again.
Having qualified and refuelled, Richard again started the race for us, this time going a bit (if not dramatically) better.
The changeover to James was fine except that once on the track he found himself with a kart that handled dramatically differently from before. Frankly he was all over the place, out to lunch, totally at sea and behaving as if he was one sandwich short of a picnic.
The reason for this became fully apparent as the right hand plug in decided to retire from motor racing almost snapping in two and letting the right hand front of the kart gently down on the tarmac.
James limped back to the pits, managed (just) to avoid wrecking the weighbridge and pushed the kart back to our pits where we re-fitted everything we had taken off at lunch time.
On the track again and James wasn't sure that the handling was a lot better. He did manage to overtake GP Racing but it was a messy affair and on the next lap he was black flagged. He couldn't think why and certainly wasn't going to come in without signals from his own pit so went on going round, feeling a bit in limbo and getting bashed up the back by successive karts as he tried to work out what was going wrong....or on.....even.
Meanwhile in the pits Richard and Thomas were rushing around getting together the bits necessary to refix the chain guard - which had come adrift - and was the cause of all the agro. Once they were ready and having fought off attacks from various officials who wanted the kart brought in immediately, the kart was brought in, the work was done in a few seconds and Thomas went out to the relief of a thoroughly demoralised James.
Like Richard, Thomas was more competitive against other karts than he had been in the morning and did a fair bit of overtaking - Team Tec, GP and CSF to name some - but we were still off the pace despite him now setting our fastest lap of the race at 40.238.
Richard drove the final stint without any more disasters again going at a good pace but all the time we had lost meant that it wasn't even worth looking where we had come.
If there's something positive to be gained from the weekend it was that our pit stops were excellent and due to good signalling we were never held up in the fuel bay. And when things did start to come apart we were able to deal with the problems as a team in an organised way.
Clutching at straws, or what!? Round 5 and Round 6 full results.
Oh yes! and finally we broke the brake disc
And the nose cone is looking a bit second-hand, for obvious reasons.
Roll on Clay Pigeon in August.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g