Lydd; October 21st 2001; Second UK Promax Race.
Final position: 4th in Clubmans Class.
This was only the second Promax race to be held in the UK and we had been lent one of the Rotax engines courtesy of JAG Engineering and Ted Poole.
Thomas and Richard had done a lot of work - certainly more than we had originally envisaged - on adapting the the Wright chassis for the new engine. The rear axle had to have a keyway lengthened, the back bumper needed a new extension to accommodate the exhaust, the side pod needed cutting to allow the radiator to fit in, the starter button and on/off switch had to be installed and of course a new sprocket and O ring chain had to be fitted.
After all that, and a party on Saturday night, they managed to set off from Cambridge at 05.30hrs on Sunday and get to the circuit by 08.00hrs to join James who had camped there overnight in the A160.
At this time it was just spitting with rain and we were expecting it to dry up, but instead it gradually just got wetter until by the time practice started there were serious amounts of standing water on the track - and in the pit lane.
Practice was OK, with the chassis working well but the engine spitting and banging, sometimes at the top end and sometimes in the middle range. We changed the jetting and the needle and put in a new plug and that seemed to cure it but we were short on qualifying time.
However, we qualified not quite on the back row and James started the race.
Unfortunately, he (like the rest of the back half of the field) got caught out by a very rapid start, which meant he lost a lot of distance on the leaders and was unable to make up any places immediately.
But as usual the chassis was working well and he started to work through the karts ahead.
And then he spun
Then he spun again
Then he lost count of the number of times he had spun
Then the engine started misfiring, though to be fair, it hadn't been on song from the start which made getting the power down smoothly a bit tricky. On lap 11 the engine was misfiring so badly that James was worried he wouldn't get back to the pits and when he did we found the air filter and its box had half a pint of water in it. We cleaned it all out and turned the air box upside down to protect it further against water attack and sent James out for a second try.
When he wasn't crashing, James was reasonably fast getting down to 52.4 after another ten laps and indeed by the end of his stint we were running somewhere around mid field.
Thomas took over on lap 47 and again circulated quickly, without crashing, getting down to his best lap of 52.3 after 32 laps.
The weather was atrocious and the rain showed no signs of letting up. If you hit one of the lakes on the circuit you simply disappeared in a wall of water and the most difficult part of overtaking was seeing where the opposition was. Meanwhile, back in the pit lane, speed was controlled by two huge puddles which, if you hit them at more than two miles per hour sent a tidal wave of muddy, oily and cold water up to helmet height, to discourage you from doing it again.
The changeovers were going well with nothing to do apart from driver change, weights change and re-fuel and on lap 92 Richard went out for his first session.
There was just the faintest glimmer now that the worst of the rain was over and Richard's times steadily improved until he reached 51.33 on lap 134 and came in to hand over to James on lap 136.
This time James managed to stay on the track and continued with the improvement in lap times as the racing line became less wet finally hitting his best time of 50.79.
Another smooth changeover and Thomas took over lapping consistently in the 51s and 50s and finally getting 49.9 on his last lap. We were probably one of the fastest karts out there and were certainly lapping the karts ahead of us in the race, but despite this, losing over ten minutes in the first session was just too much to make up and it didn't look as if we could get higher than 4th Clubmans.
Richard took over for the final stint as a dry racing line started to appear - but it wasn't dry enough for slicks. For the last 15 laps, slicks would probably have been quicker, but we would have lost more time than we gained by doing a change.
But he was lapping on average at 47.82 and on lap 247 he got our best time of the race at 46.19 - before being quite unnecessarily pushed off on the final lap.
We should have got a better result and would have done so if the first session had not been so up and down for whatever reason. But we all enjoyed ourselves enormously and agreed that we would definitely compete using the Promax engine in 2002. Its a much more exciting engine to drive, feeling like a proper racing machine rather than the comparatively stodgy GX160s.
Now all we have to to is sort out the finances to close the book on this season, sell the GX160s and possibly even the Wright and finally buy the new Promax in the new year.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g