Bayford Meadows February 18th 2007
Round 4 Rotax Endurance Winter Series
Bayford's personal cloud which seemed to have settled in on the track, soon moved on, leaving us with an overcast but dry day. The track was a bit damp in practice, but once the race got going, grip improved considerably.
We had a set of slicks left over from our last race at Bayford in November 2006, so we decided to use these rather than splash out on new ones.
James was still suffering from 'flu so we decided that he should start the race, giving him the opportunity to cut short his drive if he wasn't coping.
Thomas drove for most of practice ending with a narrow set up at the rear. Before handing over to James for the last few minutes of qualifying he set a time of 49.128 which was good enough for 7th on the grid., though quite a long way off our normal pace at Bayford.
At the start James stayed out of trouble and maintained his position.
But he was going a lot slower than he should have been - certainly not fast enough to keep up with the leaders..
However on lap three he had the opportunity to overtake Maxtastic after they made a mistake on the first hairpin.
Maxtastic had other ideas and moved across into our kart.
The result was a dinged side pod for us and a spectacular crash for Maxtastic as he went about demolishing the tyre walls in all directions.
James - rather unfairly - got a warning flag waved at him for this.
This took James up to 6th until Custom Made Windows came through to demote him back to 7th.
That's how it stayed for some laps until AH Windows who had been shadowing James for some time finally got past.
So we were down to 8th but James was fighting back against AH and they were finally pressured into a spin at the second hairpin, so restoring us to our starting position.
James was feeling OK - although driving slowly - so Thomas left him out for forty minutes before bringing him in for more fuel and the changeover.
Our pit stop was very slow due to a problem releasing the seat catches and then for some reason the engine died just as Thomas was moving off. It started again after a pause, but the whole stop was very expensive in time terms.
Thomas was immediately faster than James had been and began to put in some fast laps and to catch AH Windows who had overtaken us again in the pit stops.
But on lap 61 of the race Thomas started to get petrol sprayed over him.
Not knowing what it was he came into the pits and we found that the fuel return pipe had come off.
Luckily we hadn't lost too much petrol so we got Thomas out again pretty quickly but we had probably lost a couple of laps in the process.
This put us 8th - still in front of Maxtastic - but a couple of laps behind AH Windows.
On lap 92 Thomas got our fastest lap of the race at 47.781 and he had unlapped himself once from AH Windows and from G Force.
For the remainder of the race Thomas was lapping at a good speed and gradually cutting the deficit but there wasn't enough time to get onto terms with the other teams and he was running in something of a vacuum.
So we came 8th in the end and despite this felt fairly positive about the race. Our failure had been for obvious reasons and we know we can - and do - usually perform better!
Our thanks to Simon Blease for turning out to provide support once again. Full results are here and Ian Ward's report of the race is here.
R e d S t r i p e R a c i n g