Bayford Meadows; Round 6 Southern Promax Championship September 11th 2004
1st in Challenge Championship and 11th overall.
We managed a rare test day at Bayford the day before and amazingly the rain held off, with the track soon drying out, after a murky start. We got some useful work done.
Luckily(?!) our clutch gave up early on (better on Friday than on race day) so we bought a new one and fitted it. It was right on schedule for being replaced anyway.
Saturday started dampish but again soon dried out and everybody was on slicks. Not much sunshine though and there was a good wind blowing down the main straight.
Again practice went well with no major upsets and ending with a wider set up at the rear than previously.
Thomas qualified us in a useful 13th position in a time of 51.928.
James was to start the race but he almost didn't make it at all, with the engine refusing to start until the rest of the grid was well away.
Fortunately we got three warm up/positioning laps so he had time to catch up and get back in position.
At the start we were 12th, soon moving up to 11th as Extreme broke their chassis. On lap 7 Modelworld dropped down the order and Auto 1 came past, leaving us in the same position.
James wasn't willingly going to let Auto 1 get away and over the next few laps they traded places several times with Auto 1 having the upper hand for most of the time.
On lap 23 James got our fastest lap of the race at 51.987 - a few hundreds of a second slower than our qualifying time.
On lap 58 with Auto1Racing just in front, they tangled slightly with Midas who they must have been lapping. For a second there was gap in between and James squeezed though to take both of them, only to get banged really hard on the left hander before the carousel. The left side-pod broke and he spun but got going again and continued OK.
Thomas kept him out there for a good 65 minutes by which time we were running an inflated 7th.
The pit stop was slow, first because James stopped with one rear wheel not properly on the weighbridge, so he appeared underweight, second because having stopped at the fuel bay the re-fuellers didn't pull the kart through because they thought Kelvin was inspecting the broken side pod, and finally because we spent precious seconds with the Bary Sheene tape re-attaching the pod.
It all cost us about 50 seconds and dropped us down to 16th
Meanwhile B&R who had made a mistake by coming in directly after us, were going bananas at the delay.......
Thomas was now out and going well with Misfit in front and caught and overtook them on lap 94.
Zero and Dogz were now ahead of him and he passed the first of these on lap 133 moving into 14th before pitting for fuel on lap 140.
This time the outlap was much better at 126sec and we only dropped one place to 15th with both Dogz and Zero back in front again.
James caught Dogs OK but then took an interminably long time to get past them on lap 165 before setting off after Zero.
By the 200th lap he was into 11th place above Zero and with Auto 1 once again one place ahead.
Eight laps later came the final pit stop which was our best of the day at 111secs
And Thomas went out to battle back up the leader board again.
We had in fact lost one place to PDQ in the pits and were back in 12th which was soon converted to 11th as Special Racing Projects broke their exhaust mount.
Zero were one place behind and it looked as if that was the way it would finish for us with PDQ and Auto 1 securely in front.
However on the last lap Zero ran out of petrol, so allowing Dogz past them and thus giving us the two place lead we needed, to amass equal points with them in the Challenge Championship.
In the event Zero took the Championship since they had a higher finishing place than us in Round 3 but we took the Challenge win in this round.
A good way to end the Summer series, with plenty of room for improvement in the Winter series.
Final Championship Positions.
Full Round 6 results
Alan Wood's report.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g