Lydd International; Round 3 MSA BEKC April 26th 2003
Finishing position: 10th
Thomas and Edward were taking a day out at the bike show in Birmingham on Friday, so it was left to Richard and James to do the testing.
The weather forecast was fairly unequivocally wet but it was still dry when the team arrived and in fact stayed like that - bar a couple of spots early on - until 16:00hrs on the dot when it proceeded to bucket down until well into the night.
But back to the morning and we worked on the dry setup making fairly small changes, testing narrower front wheels, convincing ourselves that the new tyres we used at Bayford really were rubbish and getting down into 42s laps reasonably soon.
The kart felt good but not dramatically different for being straighter than it was at Bayford. The engine was similarly fine apart from some initial coughing on the main straight. This soon went as the day warmed up.
By the end of the day the track seemed to have slowed down a bit and Richard, at least, was posting comparable times to those achieved by Special Racing Projects.
When we returned on Saturday, the rain had stopped but the track was pretty wet and by about 09:00hrs it was raining again. By the time practice started although the rain had stopped, it had left the circuit awash for Thomas to test our wet set up.
However the engine wasn't completely on song and we spent some time fiddling with it and collectively shooting ourselves in our feet by putting the air intake in upside down. Once we had sorted that out Thomas went out for a few more laps followed by 20mins for James with Richard then having a session before qualifying somewhere in the middle of the grid.
James started the race conservatively taking a cautious view of the track and some quite aggressive driving, with the result that everyone and his dog went past him.
Fortunately an awful lot of people and the dog then crashed and James regained some places.
Special Racing Projects then came past with Startrite close behind and Roker Racing was there as well. A bit of a crocodile developed behind Xtreme Racing for several laps until he cut the corner to avoid a kart exiting from the pits. Roker had already gone through and away and James was losing to Startrite but he gradually caught up with SRP and finally overtook them before they pitted for an early fuel stop and a change to slicks.
By the end of James' stint there was a dry line most of the way round and he certainly would not have wanted to stay on wets for a moment longer. But there were still wet patches and to go off line was asking for trouble.
Our pit team helped with SRP's tyre change and when James pitted a few laps later we had excellent assistance from them and Neil Dodson. We took off some castor angle, went out at the front by 20mm (with hindsight 15mm would probably have been better still), and pushed Richard out on to the track.
We had put on new slicks but we had been unable to run these in since it had been too wet earlier in the day. So the first few laps for Richard were pretty difficult.
James' fastest time on wets had been 45.87 and Richard was almost instantly quicker - rapidly getting into the low 43s and getting our fastest lap of the race after less than 10mins at 43.047.
As the re-fuelling stops progressed we went as high as sixth with our true position being about 8th. SRP went past us but after a fairly epic struggle Richard caught and overtook Mr C. Since James also claimed to have overtaken them we couldn't quite work out how they were listed as ahead of us on the track - but never mind: it was nice to see the team back in the Championship again.
Richard completed 50 laps on the dot and then pitted to change to Tom. The outlap this time was 2:23 compared with 4:07 for the previous stop with the tyre change.
Thomas took over, driving well, but being plagued by a bad fit of coughing from the engine half way down the straight. This made overtaking difficult for him and made overtaking him for other teams rather too easy even when he was quicker than them round the rest of the circuit.
Nevertheless he put in some good times getting down to 43.27 towards the end of nearly 70 laps of racing.
Another good stop, refuel and changeover had James out again in 2:24.
SRP had fallen behind having run out of fuel on the circuit but now were on a charge and stormed past James without any problem relegating us to 10th.
James' times weren't very quick with more laps in the 44s than the 43s but at least he didn't crash and was certainly having a better day than our friends at Misfit Racing who seemed unable to establish an adequate relationship between the tyres and the track - they got a trophy at the end for the high quality of their spinning.
Forty laps or so later we were in the pits again for only 2:17 as Richard went out for his second drive. During James' drive a small flow of water had very gradually started to creep across the track at the sharp right hander after the bump at the back of the circuit. Each lap it covered more of the track until it was almost impossible to avoid it. But it made that corner and the following long left hander extremely interesting by the time Richard got out. But he managed to stay on track, despite it giving him a couple of nasty surprises.
The final switch to Tom was completed with just over 30 laps to go in 2:17 again.
We were still in a secure 10th but had no prospect of getting higher with Startrite and SRP out of reach unless something went wrong. It didn't, so that's where we finished.
It had been a good day's racing - enormous fun and we had managed the race pretty well. And we continue with our unbroken run of trophies since buying the 7Kart.
Thanks again to Neil Dodson at 7Kart for the usual high quality of his help and advice.
Here are the detailed results and the Motorsport News report from Barry Prosser.
And if you want to see the photographs, here they are.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g