Qualifying was going ok, or so I thought, until after just 15 minutes I started to run out of fuel. Doh!
What a muppet!!
In my defence, this new power commander has gained my a bit of mid range power, but must be dramatically increasing my fuel consumption. That's my excuse anyway and I'm sticking to it.
I only did a 1:20, which put me 14th on the grid, and last of the class A cars. Very disappointing given my successful testing session the other day. Still, I thought, I didn't really get a quick lap without traffic in qualifying before my embarrasing early exit. I reckoned I could get in amongst the mid field in the race and have some fun.
So guess what. Rain, that's what. I hate the rain and this was bad in that it was only at one end of the track.
It was dry at first, and I got a pretty good start, and after an incident at corner 2 which took a few cars off, and a spectacularly brilliant overtaking manouvre on Bob (see below), I was already running in the top 10. (Forgive my modesty - I have much to be modest about!).
Then the rain came and all my good work was undone. Having got past the leading class C cars in the dry, they quickly loomed large in my mirrors in the rain. I don't know if my car suffers more than most in the wet, or if I am just spectacularly bad at driving in the wet, but it really shows how much slower I am when the rain comes and goes. (I suspect the latter of course, but I take the view that it is better to stay on the track,even slowly, than end up sliding into the scenery like several others did).
The rain cleared up for a while mid race and I gained some places back. I was doing ok until the last lap when the rain came down again with a vengence. I had a big moment at the end of the straight when my braking point in the dry didn't quite work in the wet! Fortunately there is plenty of room to run off at that point and I managed to get back on without losing too many places. However I had Phil and Austen right behind me through the 'bombhole' and lost it big time. I went sideways, and two cars went either side of me. Austen took a trip over the grass and was lucky to get back on without any damage. I slid to a gracefull halt in the middle of the track remarkably pointing vaguely in the right direction and managed to get going straight away, so that by the next corner, if you hadn't seen what happened, it just looked like I had been overtaken by two cars in one go. So that was how I finished. 11th overall. Not too bad by past standards I suppose, but it showed up my real weakness in the wet.
I'm not sure that I'm looking forward to seeing the TV coverage this time. It may be too embarrasing.
Here's a few pics from the day:
Oh, and the scutineers picked me up on an issue with my new mouting point for the exhaust which is not supposed to be attached to the roll bar. I'm not going to have time to sort that out before Mallory as we're off to Denmark, so I'll have to miss that race. I'm gutted, but there you go. Rules is rules as they say.
So next time out will be end of April at Brands. I'm counting the days.
There's a good bit of video of one of my heroic overtaking manouvres from Bob's car here: (hope you don't mind me nicking your link, Bob!): (go to about 2 mins in and watch in Bob's mirror).
