Bayford Meadow; Round 2 MSA BEKC April 4th 2003
Finishing position: 9th
Neil Dodson turned out for us on the Thursday and was there at 09:30 eager to get on with it and complaining that nobody else had turned up. Tom and Richard's excuse was a pile up on the M11.......
Once they did arrive, rapidly followed by Special Racing Projects, Neil was an enormous help in giving advice and help throughout the day and even driving the kart in order to get the set up correct for a dry track. At one point it looked as if it was going to rain, but we got away with just a few spots and after that the weather was pretty good - a fair amount of sun even.
But we were still a couple of seconds off the pace set by SRP, so now we had to find out why. First, the engine was definitely below par. So we changed the spark plug (more than once), cleaned out the internal fuel filter; changed the petrol completely and changed main jets and needle position. The result was no change. It was particularly bad in the midfield. So we decided to live with it for the moment and do some more work on it after testing that evening.
The second problem was that Neil identified that the left stub axle was very slightly bent. So he bent it back straight.
The next thing that happened was that James clipped the tyre wall coming out of the chicane and what should have been a non event turned into a disaster when the left front wheel caught on the wall with the result that the stub axle arm broke, the steering column bent and the track rod snapped.
We could really have done without this...........
As the left front end was rebuilt, we found that the chassis was just fractionally bent - nothing we could do about that, but it will go back to 7Kart for straightening next week.
By the end of the test session we were still slower than SRP but not by very much and Thomas then spent some time stripping down the carburettor and finding a fair amount of potential blockages in the system, while James and Richard changed over to a new set of tyres to be run in on Friday morning.
With the good weather continuing the next day, Thomas went out first to see if the engine was any better. It was, but the underlying problem was still here. With advice from George Robinson, we replaced one of the floats which had got petrol in it and finally changed the main jet downwards and at last we had an engine that worked!
Tom noted that the new tyres seemed to no better than the old ones even when they were scrubbed in but Richard then took over for an hour of intensive testing with different set ups.
Finally James had 15mins to remind himself what the kart felt like since he was starting the race and then Richard came back in to qualify with the new tyres back on. Surprisingly his times were no better than before even with the new rubber.
It was a good start for James, moving up several places on the first few corners and managing not to collide with anyone else.
He was down into the 51s by lap seven but then hit a bad patch at which point Xtreme and Misfit came barrelling past. For the next half dozen laps the three karts circulated in very close formation - sometimes too close: on one lap at the approach to the chicane Red Stripe found themselves travelling a good deal faster than Misfit, and gave them a rather harder nudge than was absolutely necessary. But soon after, the trio broke up as Misfit overtook Xtreme and pulled away and James did a non stopping spin on the pits corner which cost him about six seconds.
On lap 42 James got our fastest lap of the race at 51.465 and a dozen or so laps later was into the pits for the change to Richard with Tony Ball making some pointed comments about the standard of driving being measured by the depth of the dent in the nose cone.
Richard had a pretty uneventful drive getting stuck in rather a vacuum but driving very consistently against the clock. "A bit of a time trial" was his comment as he came in to change to Thomas but he had got us up to around 10th.
While he had been out, Pit Management had come to the conclusion that the tyres were not working well and that that was at least part of the reason why Special Racing Projects in the other 7Kart were able to stay ahead of us. Richard did some further investigation around the pits when he came in and found that at least one other team were having similar problems with tyres from the same source.
Nice to have someone else to blame isn't it?
Meanwhile Tom was circulating well, proving to be the smoothest driver in the team for that afternoon - no spins, no nasty surprises and most laps within half a second of each other.
Our position wavered from 9th to 12th as pit stops were made by us and other teams, with Misfit Racing emerging as the team we needed to catch and overtake to be in the trophies again.
James took over for his second drive with the slowest pit stop of the race caused by having to put all the weights back on again - a difference of 13 seconds between our fastest and slowest stop.
James was slower this time round and his average was damaged when, in order to let a faster team through, he went too far to the left at the end of the main straight, found himself with half a wheel on the grass and the urgent necessity to turn right and put the back end into one tyre wall and then narrowly avoided putting the front end into the next tyre wall. Luckily for him, there was no damage this time, and he didn't have to stop but it lost him a good eight seconds.
The change to Richard was the fastest of the race and was followed by another good consistent drive, very nearly as fast as his first one. But the brakes were now feeling pretty feeble and Richard was suffering with very long pedal travel, little feel and less effect.
As we did our last changeover we were 11th and had to overtake Misfit to get into the trophies. Behind us was MIF Racing, but not near enough to be a threat.
Thomas was actually going faster in this session than he was in the first one and duly caught and overtook Misfit to give us 10th.
But over the last few laps the weather suddenly turned a lot colder and the engine began to cough back at the end of the straight. Probably, it was just running too weak, but Thomas backed off for fear of it expiring completely.
Having said that he did a personal best lap time five laps from the end so perhaps the tyres appreciated the colder weather (???!)
One other team must have dropped out in the last 20 minutes because we finally found ourselves 9th, thus maintaining the 7Karts's unbroken record of getting a trophy every time it's been raced.
Back in the pits after the race there was a really unpleasant noise coming from the clutch, and when Tom later stripped it down he found that one of the clutch pins had broken, though it had still allowed the clutch to work somehow. There was no sign of wear on the other ones and in future we shall just have to replace the clutch more often as a precaution.
The results are available here and there are also some photographs if you're interested.
Next race at Lydd on 26th April with more testing on 25th.
We're still playing catch-up - soon we will!
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g