Sunday - Race 1

John Hayman was racing in two events on Sunday, the Radical Enduro with me, and the Dunlop Sportsmaxx with Simon Gusterson. John had been commisioned to write a "chalk and cheese" article on the races for Track and Race Cars magazineand it was essential that he got to drive, so it was agreed that he would do the start of Race 1. It was a good job! The race started and John was circulating in 18th place overall (11th in class)... then just two laps before he was due to hand over to me, he went past the pits with the engine spitting and banging, and had to park up on the grass around Redgate corner! So, Race 1 DNF and I didn't get to drive! The problem turned out to be a broken earth strap, causing the charging system to be inoperative, the battery flattened and the car stopped!

Race 2

I started Race 2 just to be sure I got a drive. As we came round to the chicane at the end of the green flag lap for the rolling start, unknown to me and much of the feild the officials had decided to abort the start as some cars were not lined up properly. I came into the chicane lit up in second gear. hoping to get a good run on some of the cars in front, onlt to find cars ahead slowing dramatically as the pace car pulled them up! I had already started to move to the right and now had to slow up dramatically; the car behind me hit my right rear wheel, there was obviously some damage which immediately showed up in the steering wheel going out of line nearly 90 degrees to the left as the car was crabbing slightly! From there onwards the oversteer was horrendous!

I pressed on regardless and hung on to the back of the main SR3 class for several laps. In fact looking at the lap charts, for several laps I was managing to get in faster times than around six of the cars ahead of me. Then around lap 6 or 7 I had a couple of big moments while trying to hang on the the other SR3's with a now badly handling car. Not wanting to "bin" it and to ensure at least that I wasn't going to be responsible for another DNF, I backed off to a safer pace.

I pitted on lap 17 to hand over to John not getting a chance to mention the handling or damage. John drove a storming stint not realising the oversteer was down to the 1" of toe-in on the right rear, and not the tyres going off! He took it by the scruff of the neck apparently entertaining the marshals no-end!

The final result, we were 15th overall, 8th in the SR3 class. Not too bad considering all the circumstances!

Thanks go again to Graham Cox of (main sponsor) CG-Lock, Radical Sportscars and Dunlop for helping to make this happen.

Conclusion:

We came into this weekend to enjoy it, to see how we would fair, and to get a good result. The former two were achieved, the latter was less than we hoped, however, we weren't too disappointed. John and I are working towards doing the full Radical Enduro Championship in 2008 and this weekend has shown us what we need to do to be competitive. It's been encouraging because all things considered we know we can get on the pace given the right circumstances. This weekend we had a car we think was down on power (no disrespect to Slipstream) as we were losing on the straights despite carrying higher exit speeds; we went into these races with no practice in very quick cars, against drivers who have been in the series all season, some for several seasons, and there are a couple of world class professional drivers in the Championship too! So all told, we're encouraged and looking forward to doing some more. Personally, I need to get back to fitness and lose some weight! Next time we'll be doing some serious testing first! We will be back, and we will be faster!!