Daytona at Milton Keynes; March 25th; Round 2 MSA British Endurance Kart Championship.
Final position: 6th in Clubman Class; 22nd overall.
Practice was a miserable affair stuck on the end of a corporate event and extending into the night
It started cold and got worse - i.e. wet - but at least Jim Graham from Daytona has given an indication that next year things will be better: "I note the comments relating to practice and would comment that Daytona would have liked to have been able to offer Saturday daytime practice to the British Champs, but we already had an exclusive event booked in on the Saturday when the deal between N4SKRA and EKC went ahead.....We will try to ensure that we identify and reserve dates for practice for the Champs next year"
Edward, who was testing for us but not due to race (Mark was his excellent stand-in) had a spectacular crash demolishing two fences and their associated tyre walls and coming to rest in the third. The plus side was that he was able to clearly identify and analyse what went wrong.
On race day itself we arrived in good time to find a damp track but no rain. Richard started practice on pristine new slicks in order to run them in. He didn't look as if he was enjoying the experience and soon came in to swap tyres for a run-in set of slicks. James took over but the kart was still horribly difficult to drive and we changed to worn wets (intermediates) for Mark's practice session. Thomas followed and put in some good qualifying times.
Following our experience in the previous races, we tried a change of tactics for the race start. Having qualified on almost the back row of the grid, Richard put his foot down and by lap 5 was up to 14th position. But with the rain holding off it became obvious that those who had started on slicks would soon reap rewards.
However, tyre choice was not our only problem, as soon afterwards, the right rear engine mount fell off, Richard got belted up the rear and the chain came off the clutch sprocket. He cruised round to the pits on one engine, and having borrowed a new mount from Marden (thank you Marden in general, and Jeff in particular) we changed the tyres to slicks and sent him back out. But we were down to 25th.
After an hour and a half we were up to 20th and James took over for an uneventful drive apart from a few laps behind the pace car while a kart was rescued from the bottom hairpin.
Lap times came down to a best of 1:10:06 and we began to look vaguely competitive against the leaders when they lapped us.
After another hour and a half we brought James in and he tiptoed over the weighbridge at only a fraction over 180kgs.
Mark took over, overcoming the differences between driving a Lotus 7 look alike with four wheel braking and a kart with only rear wheel stopping power.
Then it was Tom's turn and the lap times came down again, eventually achieving a team best of 1:09:59 and without a single spin! Most importantly he was very consistent and the graph of his lap times is almost flat. Compare with James' whose graph looks like a cross section of the Swiss Alps.
We were a little worried during Tom's stint because soon after he started a marshal handed us another engine mount which he said had come off our kart. But he still seemed to be going OK, the engine looked firm and we could not be absolutely sure that the mount had come from him, so we left him out there.
Nevertheless we were stuck at 22nd and even though Thomas managed to unlap himself once from out nearest competitor, he would have to have done the same again four times to make any difference.
Tim was our pit wall manager for the race, and was stunningly useful in recording times for the whole six hours to keep us alerted to how the driver was doing.
We were unable to take advantage to such a degree as previously, of other people's mistakes, and we made some more of our own ( the second engine mount was from our kart), which was reflected in our final position. But we had a brilliant time and at the next race...............
Click here for the full results