Donington Park Rounds 7/8 2012

The calm period between Castle Combe and Donington was over. We decided to not do the race at Cadwell park due to the championship fight effectivly being over and then being able to put extra funds into the races I was going to do.

I did the Super GT races on the Saturday as practice as I had never raced at the track before but I had spent a track day with malcolm eddison learning the track which proved to be very benificial. It was time to see if the knowledge he gave me had stayed in my head or not.

The Super GT races ended up with a DNF in race 1 as my car over heated. Having fixed that problem between races I finished 10th over after a spin which dropped me from 4th (1st in class) to 11th right at the end of the race.

On to sundays exciting races!

Qualifying
Qually was a tricky situation as it was wet but wasn’t raining, so it was obvious the best track times will come at the end of the session. So a last minute switch back to a full dry set up would have worked if we didn’t end up starting from the back of the 36 cars on the track. However despite the traffic I put the car 7th and 6th on the grid for races 1 & 2.

Race 1
A slightly awkward starting proceedure resulted in an immediate red flag and the race being restarted. I made a decent start jumping up to 6th straight away. I later picked off Matt Palmer as he ran wide at Mcleans putting me into 5th. I got lucky when Matt Wallis decided to defend off Guy Hefford going into Redgate as I managed to go round the outside of Hefford at Redgate and up the inside of Wallis upon entry to Craner. I then had some clear space to chase Paul Hinson down which I managed to do within a couple of laps. I got a better exit out of Coppice giving me a good run down to the final chicane, I stuck this pass but it sadly made my run down to Redgate a lot slower than normal so he got back past with a last minute dive. I was still on the tail of Hinson and with Hefford buzzing around on my tail I thought I have to do this asap. So went for the inside at Coppice which sadly didn’t pay off as I locked up and went into Hison. This sadly ended both of our races and had to watch the rest from the side lines. Me and Paul talked the incident over and decided it was a racing incident.

Race 2
Starting 6th this time on the outside line for the 1st corner, I got a decent jump off of the line and held my place exciting turn 1. I then got past Mike Wells going into the chicane at the end of Lap 1 Hinson went off at Mcleans on lap 2 promoting me to 4th place but at the end of lap 2 I had also overtaken Hefford and taken 3rd place with just Palmer and Robinson infront. I put a smallish gap between me and hefford as I closed in on palmer who seemed to be getting held up by Robinson. On Lap 5 Palmer got a bad exit from the old hairpin which enabled me to get a good run on him going up to Mcleans and take 2nd place. At the start of lap 6 we came across a back marker and this made me loose focus for a second and hefford snuck past, palmer followed on the following corner and Walis went through fairly soon after putting me down to 5th. A error by Robinson demoted him to 5th as I breifly gained 4th but he soon took that back from me with a late lunge going into the chicane.

I finished the race 5th and on the final lap of the race put in the fastest lap of the race just 0.03 of a second away from Palmers lap record.

This race could have been better but at the end of the day 5th is my best mr2 championship result so I am very pleased with the result and I have shown a lot of promise for the next meeting there on the 1st September.