Donington Allcomers Race Reflections

During the Donington RGB weekend, a number of our racers signed up for the allcomers race. Paul and I used this as a chance to get some mileage in the cars and get some laps under our belt at the circuit. Donington is quite hard and expensive to get good testing at due to the stupid local council who restrict the noise at a circuit that’s been around for generations, supports social activities for hundreds of thousands a year and even more bizarrely is situated under the immediate flight path of East Midlands Airport. I once remember being told of for exceeding the noise limit (due to an exhaust failure) but being unable to hear the marshals comments as an airliner was landing!

I went into the Allcomers race with the aim of testing my start, learning the circuit, trying a few different lines and not over pushing the car and in fact did most of it well away from the rev limiter. Towards the end of the 18mins race, Paul was running quite close to me and we up’d the pace a little. Interestingly we both ran telemetry so we are able to do a little side by side comparison of both our cars and our driving styles. What makes it even better is that on the final lap we both did almost identical times, Paul in fact beating my fastest lap of 1:19.48 with a 1:19.36.

Firstly its interesting to compare the temperatures of our two cars. My mods over the winter included a simplifying of the cooling system, making it pressurized and the running temps have dropped quite substantially. So here’s a graph of the water temps of mine and Paul’s – 90degrees average for mine on the last lap of the race and an average of 72 for Paul. Now we were both out in clear air and it was quite cool at the time although each time I have run mine so far this years its been the same. If we look at the oil temps as a similar comparison we see an interesting difference. Paul’s averaging around 101degs and mine at around 113 (10deg down on mine from last year).
Paul is running a bike radiator, I am running a polo dual core car rad and we are both running separate oil coolers. I wonder what mine would look like if I removed the oil cooler and allowed the oil/water heat exchanger as standard on the blade?

Comparing speeds into, through and out of corners is also quite enlightening,
The first obvious difference is the run down the craner curves seen in this graph from our telemetry. Paul’s speeds are in green and mine are in red. The highlighted blue cross marker is placed on the apex of the left hand part of the craner curves just as it is dipping at its steepest and the part of the circuit that I find the exhilarating. Some say scary and a few times it can be, its probably the one place of all of the circuits we race at that my car is out of shape at the highest speed! I must admit that in both of the races we did at Donington this weekend that it took me a few laps to be confident to run flat out through these corners. Anyway you can see that Paul is running through this corner at 108mph with a further spurt to 112mph before braking for the old hairpin. Comparatively I am doing 116mph with little improvement until having to brake earlier for the next corner. Interestingly by the time we both get to Paul’s braking point we are doing the same speed! There is a 3mph difference in the mid corner speed through the old hairpin, I get a bit of wheel spin due to the slide through the corner where Paul gets a better and smoother run out of the corner and this advantage runs all the way up the hill where he makes good use of the increased power of the R1 engine meaning he is 2mph up at the top of the hill.

Again I enter and run through McLeans a little faster than Paul – 76mph as apposed to 69mph but Paul gets a great run out and reaches the same peak as me at 100mph before we enter Coppice, run almost the same speed through and down the straight. Again his power helping a little to reach a back straight maximum speed of 130mph compared to my 125mph.

All of the other items in the telemetry are unsurprisingly quite similar.