Lydd International; April 27th 2002
Final position: 6th Clubman, 17th Overall.
James had stayed overnight in Ashford while Thomas and Richard had chosen the hard option of getting up far too early in Cambridge in order to get to the track by 08:00hrs.
However everyone arrived on time to sunshine, and with differing weather forecasts for the day. Thomas' satellite weather man carried the most weight, and he was predicting a dry day - everyone else said rain.........
We spent practice trying to come to terms with tyre pressures, starting very low and moving up to over 40psi. Richard was doing the testing and eventually we ended up in the mid range - more or less as usual. In retrospect we could have spent more time at the bottom range of the scale and we might return to that at the next race.
Thomas qualified well with a time of 43.966s which put us 19 on 19 for the second race in succession except that this time we were nearer the middle than the back.
There were 26 teams competing which made for an exciting start. Thomas got a little blocked and dropped a place but immediately started moving up the field lapping in the 43s and putting SZR under some pressure (rather in the same way that a hammer puts a nail under pressure).
On only lap 10 he got our best lap of the race at 43.577 but by lap 30 lap he was struggling with a deteriorating kart - the rear tyres just weren't gripping as before. After a quick drive through the gravel at the end of the main straight he had to give up on SZR and his lap times climbed up into the 44 and 45 second area.
But we were up to 16th and maintaining our position on the track, picking up places as others made mistakes.
After 40 mins, as he ended his first drive, we were still in 16th and after a brief hold up at the fuel bay James took over.
This was an unspectacular drive, without any real problems apart from an excursion onto the grass going onto the start finish straight, but he got nowhere near Thomas's times, circulating mainly in the mid 45s.
But the weather was getting progressively colder as the wind got stronger and more cloud drifted in. In fact at the beginning of James's session two or three drops of rain did actually fall.
Richard was out next, driving well, down in the 44s and kept up our race record of no stop race crashes.
He reported that whenever the sun came out his lap times improved by about a second. Unfortunately this didn't happen very often, but it indicates that either he was suffering from SAD or the tyres simply weren't working well at these temperatures.
And those temperatures were definitely going down - the pit wall crew were freezing in the strong wind as Richard came in to swap with Thomas once again.
This time he was significantly slower - lap times were mainly in the mid to high 44s and 45s, but he was doing a fair bit of overtaking and we were jumping around in a mid field position. It's interesting to note that this time last year our fastest lap in very similar conditions, but using the twin Hondas instead of the Rotax was 46.947.
The changeover to James was the fastest of the race, the two out-laps amounting to 2:32.66 in comparison to our slowest of 2:44.79 when we had been held up by another kart in the re-fuelling bay. 12 seconds is an awful lot of time to lose and if the grids are going to get bigger we need to re-think our strategy on changeovers.
In his first stint James found more to criticise in his driving than in the handling of the kart but this time it was noticeably more difficult to hold the kart together - for example on the long left hander before the kink onto the main straight. Through the right kink itself the kart handled well so the straight became a good place to overtake and a place where few others overtook us - and the engine was brilliant.
Richard drove to the end getting in some fast laps right at the end and managing to avoid being totalled by another driver who was obviously suffering from emotional overload.
We got 17th in the end and 6th Clubman, and we felt happy with the way we had organised the race and driven it, but we just need to find a bit more speed. This time there's only a three week gap to the next race, which is good, and we're back at Clay which we've raced at twice now. So we're feeling optimistic.
We thought we had had a pretty non-damaging day, but when we came to look, we found that one of the lugs holding on the floor tray at the front had broken and the other two were cracked. In addition the the brake disc is now chipped and bent beyond further use. The rear tyres looked smugly underused. So Thomas has stripped down the chassis completely and is taking it back to Wrights for a check up, new lugs and a change in the position of the seat stays.
Full race results are available here.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g