John Hayman (Evo Magazine) and I raced a Radical at Donington at the weekend...

John Hayman on the grid at Donington yesterday (05-08-07)

The weekend began with me instructing a customer in Slipstream Racing's Radical SR3 on Friday's Evo Track Day which is part of the Dunlop Great & British Festival race meetings. My customer. Andrew Greenwood, had raced Radical Prosports four or five years ago and wanted a "refresher" and to try out an SR3 withy a view to returning to racing. However, Andrew didn't want to do the race meeting, so, as the car was going to be at the circuit anyway I gave John (who I've raced with before) a call and we decided we would do the races. Graham Cox of CG-Lock agreed to provide a substantial proportion of the budget and was therefore our title sponsor. Thanks to Graham for that! John brought some sponsorship too, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to mention where from just yet!

John and I came to the race meeting hoping for a good result, and in many ways it wasn't too bad following some bad luck. First of all, neither John or I had driven a Radical for some time, in my case 11 months and even then only on a track day; John hadn't driven one for a couple of years (he had previously been a frontrunner driving with the factory team at the time). So we were both jumping in at the deep end entering a race with no proper testing. I did around 15 laps on Friday with Andrew in the passenger seat and John did a similar number, half on his own, and half with me in the passenger seat. So our first proper run was in the 30 minute free practice session on Saturday morning and we were somewhat off the pace with John being the quicker of the two of us! The reason for this was eventually discovered a few days after the race meeting... see below.

Qualifying was better - a brand new set of Dunlops went on the car and John did the first half of the session. I took over and did the second half of qualifying - this time we were more evenly matched, my time being the one that got us our grid position. So we were on a pretty lowly slot on the grid... but at least we weren't last! We have since discovered that the engine in our SR3 was seriously down on power. We did in fact complain to Slipstream about this over the weekend but nothing was done about it, it wasn't even checked. The engine was fainally looked at during the week following the race meeting and was discovered to have very low compression on all of its 4 cylinders, down from 250 psi to 140 psi, which would affect the power substantially... full story here!

The Races....