Thruxton RGB Race Sat 27th May -PM

Allcomers Race.
I just about managed to get half of my lunch down before we were called for the Allcomers race. Buy this time it was drizzling which was nice! I had left the car on its dry settings on the basis that the weather was not looking too bad and I wanted to make the most of any running as possible. The race was great fun but my heart was not really in it to be honest, I really did just want to learn the track more. I managed to have a good run ahead of the other RGB class C cars from the start. I tried a few alternative lines and watched were the overtaking places were and how to defend them. The track was very slippery and when Colin and John started to attack a bit I just relaxed and made sure I kept it on track in prep for the RGB race. Being on pole meant I really wanted to be in top condition for that race. You never know I might be able to do quite well!

RGB Race.
Well by the time we were due to race the heavens had really opened. It was chucking it down. Thanks for holding the umbrella Tony!

We had a really long wait on the grid in the pouring rain and then a green flag lap that just affirmed the lack of grip! You can see from the picture here that we were 4 a breast on the grid, I am right at the front on the right. Pole position in class C with just 3 class A cars in front. Martins Phasar on the far left, Tims Genesis and Jonathans Radical.

For the 3rd race in a row I manages a good start! I kept to the left and around Tim Pell in the lime green Genesis class A car and beside Jonathan in the class A Radical. Jonathan managed to regain the position due to a better line into turn 2 but I did not see what happened to Tim due to the amount of spray. The first couple of laps were quite an adventure, I had a slightly better view than most as Martin Brooks in the Phasar just shot off into the distance meaning I just had to peer through the spray from the Radical. There was quite a bit of standing water in some places and I was rather cautious at first as I have never run these tyres in standing water before. .


The car was handling well with my experimental wet setup but the rear was still too stiff and Mikes car, directly behind me was more compliant at the rear meaning he had better traction



After sitting on my tail and waiting for a while and few mistakes from me going into the complex, Mike manages to get past me making best use of his better traction out of the complex on the run down to Noble.We had some fluctuation in the gap between us due to passing different back markers and towards the end of the race I was able to reduce the gap a little bit. Gordon Griffin in the Class A Mission had worked
his way past me and Mike with his far superior power.

On the last lap, whilst I was closing on Mike, He and Gordon were running very close as we headed around the faster second half of the circuit into Nobel and approaching Goodwood. Gordon spins in Noble and Mike goes with him. I just about manage to hold it together, caught the slide, slowed down a little more than Mike and just missed Gordon by a cats whisker as he came to rest in the middle of the track. With Mike still spinning, I planted the accelerator and headed for the finish, held it together for the remainder of the last lap and finished 3rd overall and 1st in class!

So if you don't count the disqualified race at Snetterton back in April, this is my first race win :) With all of the effort put in before the race meeting and the length of the journey down for the day it was a very very sweet end to the day.

Thruxton RGB Qualify Sat 27th May - AM

Well with all of the fun before the race meeting, it was really good to get to Thruxton and get into the racing. The effort made the event even more enjoyable.

Earlier on last week I signed up for the Allcomers race in addition to the RGB race. As the BikeSports race was so poorly attended we could sign up for some much needed additional track time. Thruxton does not allow many normal test days or trackdays and the 750 motor club has not been there fore 8 years. I think that meant that the track was new to all of use in RGB which levels the playing field for me a little!

On the late night drive down to Thruxton, Tony and I planned the aims for the meeting and Tony gave me a very detailed run through all of the corners on the circuit from the circuit guide book and quizzed me on them as well!
So the aims for the day.

1. Final check for fluid leaks and spanner check when we arrive.

2. Use the Allcomers qualify to run the engine in and check oil temp/pressure etc. I needed to do the 3 min laps so aim for 4 or 5 and then check the car over. It was also THE time to learn the circuit. I didn't need a good time for this race so I needed to do as much as possible to learn the track.

3. Use the RGB qualify to expand track knowledge and get a good lap time.

4. Use the Allcomers race to learn where to overtake and defend and also to see what alternative lined I can use. Oh and don't crash!

5. RGB race -well just do as well as possible I guess!


Allcomers Qualify.
All went exactly to plan, the circuit started to come a little clearer but its still very hard to work out where to go. I did about 5 laps, car behaved perfectly if a little soft at the rear but it was cold and a little damp so I didn't want to go much harder. No leaks just a few bolts we could tighten post session. Good job to all who helped!

RGB Qualify.
Between the sessions I sat back down with the circuit guide and reviewed the layout.
Out for the session and some nice clear track, so I just put my head down and tried to do my best. The fast corners are amazing. Goodwood and then down into Church are a real thrill when you are fully committed. Wow what a circuit. Anyway car felt good, still a touch too soft but nice and forgiving and controllable over the bumps. I did not know how well I had done but nobody passed me and the track was starting to flow. As always with a new circuit I concentrated on the fastest corners as they led on and off the straights. Well I would have if there were any straights!

A little while after the session the times were out. Wow,...
Pole position for class C and 4th overall including all of the Class A cars!
My pole time was 1.5 seconds faster than anyone else in Class C with an Average speed of 99mph - good result so far.

Last min repairs before Thruxton - New Gearbox PLEASE!

So Paul and I had planned an evening trackday at Snetterton for Thursday evening with the aim of trying out some setup changes. Anti roll bar sweeps and damper changes mainly. We know snetterton well and have telemetry from the RGB Race back in May so the idea was really good. Now the last time I tested at snetterton was just before the season started and I managed to wreck the gearbox in spectacular fashion due, we think, in part to a failing fuel pump causing the engine to stall after a hard run down the straight.
"Stalling engine + trying to jump down lots of gears = crashed cogs" I think the saying goes!
Anyway we did some initial runs, changed the anti roll bars, went out and the car felt just about as I would expect it to. I went for an extreme setting, changing from the softest to hardest front setting and unsurprisingly this over stifferned the front and caused initial understeer. Once powering out of the corner it exaggerated the oversteer although I guess this is partially due to my frustration with the understeer and trying to get back on the throttle harder to make up the times.
Have I mentioned before I don't like understeer?

anyway my session was rather cut short when I came out of Corum into Russels behind other cars, caught a bad gear change and the car started to make clanking noises. Short crawl back to the pit garage and the car would not go into neutral despite the neutral light being on.

Long story short I had shot the retaining clip out again and crunched 4th gear quite successfully!
At this point, enter stage right, some amazingly helpful friends and family.

1. Andy, as always was amazingly helpful even on the end of the phone in the evening, offered to fit me in for a gearbox replacement first thing on the Friday morning if I could get the engine to him and do a turn around that day.
2. At short notice straight after the trackday on Thursday, John helped me take the engine out in a couple of hours. Not to shabby bearing in mind it has been 3 years since we have done that particular job!
3. Friday am, I took the engine down to Andy, and he turned it around by 2:30 which is amazing.
4. Dad then came around to help me put the engine back in and Tony arrived after work to help finish the job. We had a slight delay with having to take the engine back out because the prop had dropped down in our first attempt and then a little fiddle getting the coolant sorted meant a rather late leave to head down to Thruxton (9:30pm and 3+ hour drive) but the traffic was light and we managed a few hours sleep before the race meeting at least!

Prep for Thruxton

Well this Saturday is the Thruxton race, a circuit with quite a reputation and the highest top speed of all in the UK. Looking forward to it!

In prep I have replaced the fuel filter, fibre-glassed up the bonnet on the inside and completed an oil change. You can see from the photo the inside of the bonnet before I patched it with fibre glass. I will leave the top surface simply covered with Gaffer tape for now until I get some correctly colour gel coat next week.

This evening I have an open pitlane trackday at Snetterton for a quick shakedown test and to try out some alternative suspension setups. After that is just a quick spanner check, a refuel and it will be down to Thruxton on Friday evening.

A few post Cadwell car tweaks

Bonnet Repairs:
After the race tent blew over in the middle of the night, I now have a little work to do to patch up the bonnet. During the race some gaffer tape worked wonders but I can't seem to find the right shade of blue!
I think I can get away with some paint impregnated fibre glass resin and maybe one sheet of fibre glass on the inside.

This latest impact into the fibre glass does highlight a couple of points.

• Firstly, that the quality of the fibre glass on the Fury is not too high. It actually looks like the only strength this part of the bonnet has comes from the gel coat on the top!
• Secondly, I received some advise from a number of racers, when I started, around not being too worried about the aesthetics of the car as it is likely to get bashed a bit in the course of racing. I think they might be right!
  

New Headrest:
John was kind enough to make me up a new headrest / support which is much closer to my normal head position now that I have the seat further forward. Some revealing pictures from Snetterton showed a rather large gap between my head and the pad which did not look too good if there was to be a large impact. So now installed, just a few mm behind my head when I have a helmet on and even painted blue!

Fuel Filter:
For the latter third of the Cadwell 2nd race, I had a recurrence of an old issue with the engine. Back in pre-season testing both at Snetterton and then at Brands, the engine would try to stall itself when coming off a prolonged full throttle application and it normally coincided with me changing down gears for a tight bend. Only then to find out that it would not get into gear as the engine had stopped. Great fun as you can image and diagnosed as being a failing fuel pump.

When I replaced the fuel pump I put in a glass (easy to see the dirt levels) in-line fuel filter just before the fuel pump. So back to Cadwell 2nd race and the same started happening again. Not as bad as before but enough to mean that there was rather too much rear wheel braking for my liking and Paul commented on seeing a trail of tyre smoke from the rear inside wheel as I braked for the mountain section.

So I had a good look around after the race and found the fuel filter to be very very dirty. In fact when I opened it up to replace the filter element I was rather surprised at how much dirt there was in there. I am not sure if it had all come up from the tank due to running down quite low on fuel (was at 4ltrs remaining after the 30min race) or whether it got stirred up due to the spin across the bumpy grass earlier in the race :)
Anyway duly replaced and all cleaned up . I was planning on including a picture to show just how much dirty was captured by the filter but the photo is a little blurred. My excuse (and I have been practicing this with racing excuses as there seems to be a real art to do it properly) is that the filter is in a glass container and the auto focus on my camera must have been confused!

I am hoping to do an evening trackday test before going to Thruxton to check it is all ok but I have some more replacement filters if it appears that there is more dirt in the tank. Then I will probably just drop the tank out and clean it completely or buy a plastic tank bag whilst I am at it.

Talking of Thruxton, I called the 750mc yesterday and booked in for Thruxton which is just one week Saturday. Can't wait!

A Few More Pics from Cadwell

Some additional pictures from Tony and James who came up to kindly support me at the Cadwell race weekend. Thanks guys. Even though quite a bit of Cadwell is inaccessible by spectators there are so many corners in such a short distance of the start finish area, that you can get some good viewing locations around the mountain see some great corners leading towards and away from the start.

Testing out the braking limits of the track during qualifying.

Testing out the grip limits of the grass during qualifying
A more conventional way of taking The Mountain.
Lap 2 out of Mansfield
Lap 2 into the Mountain
Over the line to take 2nd with John Goodwin just behind.

The RGB crowd at the presentations on Sunday afternoon

Cadwell Park - Race 2 May 1st 2006

Monday dawned with a very dark cloud layer giving fairly persistent drizzle after a night of rain and some surprisingly strong winds. With the Class A / B race due before lunch the drivers were prepping for a wet race and adjusting setups including their estimation on the fuel loads required for the 30 mins duration

The Class C race however was set for a mid afternoon race and all the forecasts predicted a change to dry condition post lunch but still left the drivers with some uncertainty over the track conditions.

For once I made a good start, managed to keep my (4th place) starting position for a change thanks to some suggestions from other racers including Paul. If I was able to run at the pace from yesterday, I knew I had some good pace to get past Jonathon Thackray and John Goodwin even if I had a little work to try and get on the pace of Tim at his favorite circuit.

Lap 1, I made an attempt to pass Jonathan T but he help the position.
Lap 2, I got a good run through Coppice and Charlies to give me a run at Jonathan T down the long park straight and carried out a simple down the inside overtake into Park corner. That’s 3rd!

Next up was John Goodwin and I knew he would not like to let me past as easily as in the first race of yesterday, in fact he has said exactly that between the races. So I did the same at the previous overtaking move on lap 4, concentrated on a good run onto the Park Straight.

It all came down to who would brake the latest and John made sure I did not have it easy. Well I then learnt a new lesson in my new found racing experience. Lesson to self: “ It’s OK to attempt an overtaking move and then abort it when it looks like it will not work. There are other opportunities and sometimes you need to try and then try again later”. You can probably guess this does not end brilliantly! Well I did go for the overtaking move but unfortunately I had left the braking just a little (and I mean just a little) bit too late meaning that although I made the overtake OK, I ended up running wide on the exit of the corner and found out just how slippery the grass is after a night of rain A little sideways and then backwards sliding is great fun unless you are watching lots of cars that were previously behind you rush past. So I rejoined the track behind Tim in 8th place and set about a meteoric come back. Lets see if Cadwell is really one of those tracks where passing is hard.


Took me a little time to get past Tim Hoverd, he was rather more reactive to a car spinning and loosing his bonnet in front of us on the brow of park straight which meant I need to brake harder than I expected and it took me a little while to get back behind him for an overtake. Although I was a bit quicker than Tim around Cadwell, he is actually quite neat and tidy, meaning that most of my time difference is actually on the faster interlinked corners where it is hard to pass. Compared to some of the other group around him it was much harder to just pass at the end of a straight. Maybe I was being a little more gentlemanly towards Tim as he has helped me quite a bit in my preparation for racing this year by answering the newbies questions so honestly! On Lap 4 I passed Tim going into Coppice!
Next up was Jonathon Thackray who I caught and we both passed David Whale passed into Park on lap 7. Into the Gooseneck on that same lap, we come up to Adrian Chapman to lap him and
Lap 8 the slip stream down over the start/finish line and I dive to the outside racing line before Jonathan can and go around the outside of him into Coppice.
As I came behind John Cutmore in the Westfield I realized making much more progress was going to be hard with so little time left. It did however prompt John to push quite a bit harder, he in fact dropped his lap time down to low 1:39s from previous 1:40’s as I approached. I also at this point noticed that Tim in the lead was not be chassed by anybody and thought to my self that this might mean he was not pushing that hard. A new idea then popped into my mind that I could gain another point (equivalent to me finished in 4th instead of the actual 5th which would be the same position as I started in) if I could achieve a fastest lap for the race.


It was also a little bit of a personal challenge as I know I could improve on the lap time I had posted in qualify but had not managed to achieve this in the first race due to battling with John Goodwin. So I set about some clean and then more aggressive laps and saw the sector and then lap times come down and down until I hit a 1:38 which was very satisfying indeed for the first outing at this circuit.

Cadwell Park Race 1 Sunday 30th April 2006

2nd place on grid for the first race, next to Tim was definitely more than I had planned for Cadwell.
Off the line, I attempted to reduce wheel spin but in the end I bogged down. Not perfect but my reactions and the actual run down to the first corner was a definite improvement over my 3 previous starts! John Goodwin pasted me off the line, but I managed to fend off David Wale into coppice. The remainder of the lap was very close with John Goodwin and Tim Gray, all of use feeling the grip limit and Tim was taking it nice and easy which kept us close.
The engine was not fluffing any more after cleaning out air filter (a little too much K&F filter oil applied in the previous weeks prep).

Lap 2, I get a good run out of Barn, nice and smooth through Coppice and miss a gear into Charlies meaning I drop back from the leaders a little and take the straight and Chris Curves to catch up the 4 car lengths.


Lap 4 overtaking John Goodwin for 2nd place. Concentrated on a good run out of the first couple of corners in the lap and was very close to John all the way down the straight. Hanging on to his rear corner I edged off the racing line towards the inside for the upcoming tight right hand Park corner. John duly moved to the right to cover the corner entry and I dived back to the racing line. As John returned a little to the left to allow for a better run into the corner and just as we started to brake I headed back for the right of the track. John tried to recover, bringing me right to the edge, a little dust was sprayed, I stayed committed, locked up a little and made the move stick. 2nd place was mine again!

The rest of the race was just a matter of keeping John behind, being nice and smooth and learning the track more in preparation for tomorrows race.
Lapped Adrian Chapman at the Hairpin and on the next lap did Lapped Judi at the same spot, followed by a lovely corner long 4 wheel drift through Barn!


All photos are (c) of Tony Sissons [http://www.fullframephoto.co.uk]

Cadwell Park Qualify Session

Rather delayed I am afraid.
Leading up to the race weekend I was really excited about going to Cadwell but also quite apprehensive as I really did not know the track and it is well known to be complicated and hard to overtake on as well as being very enjoyable.
Went out for qualifying without any real understanding of what sort of lap time I would get. I knew what the leaders did last year and what Paul had managed in his earlier session but I really did not know the circuit. I could just about remember where the corners went from my wet trackday in the Westy more than a year ago but I never got near the limit then due to the weather. Paul did a very reasonable time and my aim was to equal or if possible beat it!
The first few laps were just to remind myself where and to get the required 3 banker laps in. Then I set the dash to show me sector times and concentrated on get each progressively more important corner improved. Starting with those on and off the main straights and the fastest corners of course. Pleasingly the sector display showed improvement for almost each and every one. The lap times came a tumbling down by around a second a lap. Lap 7 and 8 were in the 1:39s which was amazing with my last and final lap being even quicker through to half way before I came up behind slower traffic. So first time out and I managed 2nd for the first race and 4th for the second. Excellent!

Cadwell Park Races

Quick summary as I am travelling on work this week.