Brands Hatch June 22nd

Brands Hatch on June 22nd was our latest round in the RGB 2008 season as well as hosting the replacement round for the weather aborted round at Snetterton.

It very nice to have a number of friends, and friends of friend to come down for the Sunday. John was down as usually to help with all things mechanical, Dad was down to do some photography. Tony came down with the boys for support, also joined by one of his new work colleagues and her family. Finally Neil an old friend who I used to race against online before I took up real racing was also along for the race day.

Qualify Session
The Qualify session went very well, I had to bed in some new front brake pads as well as scrub in a new near side front tyre which meant I needed some space on track for some abnormal braking applications and also to run at a decent pace from the outset so I had a fun first lap, passing quite a few cars! In the end I did not quite manage a time to equal our earlier visit to Brands in April, let alone the pre-season testing times but a 50.83 was good enough to give me pole by 1.25seconds back to Doug, who put in a good performance all weekend. Martin punched in a very impressive lap time in the class C car of 52.47 to get third overall on the grid, a time that is 8 hundredths of a second under the current lap record. Paul qualified 6th overall on the grid, a couple of tenths off his own lap record, 2 places and a tenths or so ahead of Colin, the second placed class B car. Here is some in car action from my pole position lap.


Here is some in car action from the first few laps of qualify as I passed through traffic and got the brakes working correctly.


Race 1
Here you can see the pack as we all head down through Paddock Hill bend for the first time. I had a reasonable start, managing to keep in front of Steve and Doug. I was probably a little conservative into the hairpin, where Steve tried to come around the outside but he could not convert that into a pass on the run down to Graham Hill bend so I kept the lead. John managed a good start to jump ahead of Martin, who was followed closely by Tim Gray and Paul. As you can see from these two pictures, the entire pack managed a very neat run for the first few corners, with no incidents at all! It does look as though Richard and Tim might have had a slightly nervous experience of paddock hill however, being that far out to the outside!

Martin kept the inside line for the hairpin and regained 4th overall which left us with a nice picture on the run down to Graham Hill bend.
You can see the start of a battle here for Mat and Al, just behind Paul that would run for the rest of the lap as Al struggled with under inflated tyres due to a faulty pressure gauge.
By the time we came around to the end of the first lap, I was able to pull out a slight lead, enabling me to rejoin the normal racing line and set about building a gap back to the rest of the pack. By lap3 I had a 3 second lead to Steve who then retired due to a hole in his water radiator which left Martin in the class C car as second on the road and by the end of the race I had a 27 second lead. I was not quite able to put in the same pace as I did in qualifying but I did record a 51.01 second lap, a couple of tenths from my lap record set back in April.

The car performed very well, with just a touch more understeer than I would have liked which may have been the reason for the slightly slower times compared to April. The new brake pads were great once they had settled in and I still love driving this circuit. The blast down to Graham Hill bend and the slides through Clearways especially.