Cadwell Park - July 2008

Before we went up to Cadwell, we had reset the rake in the car back to just under 5mm higher at the rear than at the front to cure the understeer experienced at Brands.

The weather forecast for the weekend was not looking good, so we set the car up for wet settings just in case it was raining hard as predicted. We could then just get the car out of the trailer and head onto the circuit but as it turned out we had much better weather over the weekend but it always looked menacing.

For the qualify session with the rain clouds looming, we went out with the car in wet suspension mode, which means soft damper settings and the front anti roll bar detached. As the track was almost dry when we went down to the assembly area, we chose to use the normal dry tyres. It was an interesting test session, we have never run the car in the setup before, although I was hoping that the softer setup would suite the bumps and undulations of Cadwell.

The qualify session went quite well, without the major drama we had in the qualify session for the first outing at Cadwell a few month ago. The setup gave some interesting results. The increased rake had made the runs through Charlies 1 and 2 very positive and allowed me to get onto the power early without making the car too nervous through the high speed turn1. The softer dampers had given better traction through the very fast Chris curves at the back of the circuit, to the point where I found it very hard to get the rear of the car mobile with the throttle so I could keep a smooth arc on the run up to the gooseneck. This may have been compounded by the extra grip from the rear tyres now running on 7” width rims. The real negative side to the setup was the much slower response from the front suspension in settling down after the many bumps on the circuit. In particular, one area that caught me out a few laps into the qualify session, was the braking into the run up to the complex of corners at the bottom of the mountain. As I came off the throttle at near maximum revs in fourth gear and got on the brakes, the front of the car bobbed up and down like a Porsche 911. That made it quite hard to brake the desired amount and I must of ended up locking almost every wheel at some point in the attempt to slow down for the first left hander. After that short shock I was able to be smoother off the throttle with a more gradual application of the brakes and eliminate the problem.

I managed a 1:33.8 for my pole time, around 4 tenths of a second slower than last time we came to Cadwell. Looking at the telemetry I was a little earlier on the brakes for a few of the corners, although in most of those corners I maintained a little more mid corner speed than before. This may well be due to some uncertainty over the grip levels and the softer setup which compromised the transition into a corner but gave good grip once I was in the corner itself.

The rake setup definitely worked as I managed to improve the first sector (start finish line to the start of the park straight) and the second sector (park straight and the park corner at its end). The telemetry backs up my feeling that I had managed to get a smoother transition onto the brakes into Park corner and have gained some time there. The in car video shows this as being neater than the previous qualify session as well.

Race 1.

It looked like it was going to do as predicted in the weather forecast and actually started to rain heavily just before our first race. In fact it started just as we were to head down to the assembly area and we made the quick change over to run the new wet weather tyres.

As we lined up on the grid, the rain stopped. I made a good start with just a touch too much wheelspin, followed by John who also had a good start and jumped in front of Tim, but by the time I was at the end of the park straight the red flags came out. On the way back around to the grid, I could see a number of cars had come together at the first turn, that included Pauls car up on the grass. As we lined up on the grid we could watch Henry’s, Richard’s and Paul’s cars being collected, each with suspension damage or wheels missing.

The second restart was a little better with slightly lower revs which matched the low grip levels better, this time followed by Tim and the rest of the field who all took the first turn a little more cautiously.

Tim was to have a very good race, being able to create a gap back to the rest of the field in the first few laps and maintain that for the entire 18mins. Meanwhile, John, Al and Steve were to be battling all race, the power of the class A genesis making it impossible for John to pull away even though he was quicker through the corners. Just behind that lead group, Colin and Tim were to be found nose to tail for a number of laps.

I had a fairly uneventful race out front to be honest, the odd slight twitch, one of which Dad did a good job of photographing and as the track dried out the lap times came down. As soon as I saw a 1:34.8, I decided to take it easy and spare the wet tyres. That is 4 tenths of a second off my current lap record.

The rest of the race was plain sailing and we took the chequered flag, a short interview, a laurel and cup and 13 points from race 1.

Race 2 was very similar but thankfully this time without any first lap accidents. Paul had done a great job aided by John and Andy to get his car back to pieces and ready for the second race after borrowing a replacement upright from Al.

Henry unfortunately was not able to get his car back together as his live rear axle had sustained serious damage, Richard was in a similar situation with front suspension damage that was not repairable in the time between race 1 and race 2.

Tim had also been assisted by the many helpful hands in the paddock to repair his rear end damage after a shunt into the barriers at Charlies 1 during the first race.

Race 2 looked again like it was going to be wet but ended up being dry and yet again we were on the wet setup and wet tyres. Oh well at least we know how well that setup works and that the times look good. I had a good start and managed to pull a comfortable margin quickly, you can see from this picture of the start that it is very close grid layout and not the wheelspin from Tim on the 3rd row.

I managed to put in some good first few laps and on laps 4 and 5 I did times in the 1:34s, the second of which showed on my dash as being a 1:34:35, a few hundredth of a second under my lap record. In the end the official results recorded it as being slightly slower, so no new record but good proof that the car is quick even when compromised a little by a soft setup and wet weather tyres. My summary on the new wet tyres is that they work fine in the dry! We have not had a chance to run them in lots of standing water which is what they were intended for but I have now completed two 18min races in almost dry conditions and although they heat up more and you have to be careful not to slide them around too much, they do not seem to give away any noticeable traction compared to the uncut counterparts.

I am really looking forward to Donington Park this coming weekend, a circuit that I had a ball at last year shadowing the Class A cars. My fastest lap last year was just a touch off the Class C lap record at 1:19.33 and Robs Class A Pole laptime was a 1:15.76 with Gordon fastest race lap of 1:14.9.

I particularly like the high speed flowing sections and comparing the telemetry (unfortunately the systems are different so a direct comparison is not easy) and in the Class C car last year I was running the downhill craner curves at 107 mph rising to 110mph and Rob in the BDN was doing 113mph rising to 117mph before braking into the old hairpin.