24th/25th September 2011 Pembrey Super GT & Rounds 10/11

Having never been to prembrey before and it being such a long drive (5 hours infact!) we decided to enter the Mr2 Super GT races on the Saturday as a bit of practice and to make the trip a bit more worth while.

Saturday – Qualifying – 6th/5th
Having never been to the track before I was wandering around the paddock taking in as much information as possible about the track before I went out onto it to get myself a decent idea of what to do, with the mr2s having their own paddock this time around we had our own area to grid up, this meant that we had to follow a safety car round to the pitlane before the session could start, I decided to park my car behind a couple of drivers I knew had been testing the day before this was ideal as I just had to copy what they were doing to give myself a decent base to work from.

During the session I was keeping up with John Wilson who had been testing the day before, it then became quite interesting as the line i needed to take became hard to see on, because Mr Wilson decided to unleash his smoke screen on me at several parts of the track. After a few laps he realised what was going on and pulled off the track giving me some ”clear air” to play with.

At the end of the session I was 6th for race 1 and 5th for race 2 ahead of a few people that had been testing and not that far behind the people infront

Saturday – Race 1 – 4th overall 3rd in class
With the track now wet with no rain falling it was going to be interesting. Starting on the left hand side of the grid and getting a decent start I went to the left of Alex Knight who left a perfect MR2 sized gap for me to use, I then decided to go around the outside at turn 1 which proved benificial as I came out of the 1st corner in 4th place 2 places up on my starting position, the 3 cars infront are James Cross, Roland Wilkinson and The mk3 super gt of Nick Holden, James and Roland quickly got passed Nick in the opening laps and cleared off into the distance while I was left struggling to find a way past as he could just fly away down the straights giving me no chance to get up the inside so I tried applying a bit of pressure to force him into a error so I could slip past but he seemed to just ignor the pressure and stayed infront so i decided theres no point risking damage as its effectivly just testing for me and backed off a little bit so I could practice my lines and see where the grip was and finished in 4th place which was 3rd in class.

Saturday – Race 2 – 3rd overall 3rd in class
The rain restarted shortly after the 1st race and didn’t stop until after the 2nd race, which made the conditions very similar to mallory park. Not realising this at the start of the race I started with way too many revs and just wheel spun away and found myself dropping back to 8th place by the end of the 1st lap which wasn’t the best way to start in these conditions as I couldn’t see a lot after that. With the thought of ”this is only testing why am I risking my car in this weather” put to one side I started to work my way back up the field in the early laps being a bit tentative of overtaking while I worked out where I could see and where the grip was, I got past most of the championship cars and found myself 4th in class (6th overall) so fairly close to where I started but on the back of Nick Holden again this time though it wasn’t that hard to find away past as he made a small mistake on the entry to the left hander allowing me to slip up the inside while he spun around, next up was the mk2 super GT of Rob Horsfield for 4th place pressuring him into a small wobble upon entry into the ”esses” I sliped past going into the ”hair pin” lucky for me he made a error at the following corner and wasn’t able to give me any pressure. I had a fairly quite race from there in 4th but then John Wilson spun off the track which promoted me to 3rd place with only a couple of laps left in the race with no chance of catching Roland and James in the final few laps I decided to just maintain the gap to the car behind and take 3rd place.

Sunday – Qualifying – 3rd/8th
Overnight the rain stopped and this left us with a drying track to play with in the morning, with a 29 car strong grid you have to expect a lot of traffic but with a drying track the plan is to make sure you have a clear track for the final couple of laps when the track will be at its best.
Sadly getting onto the track I was towards the back of the pack and had a lot of traffic to deal with early on, coming up to the back of a pack of about 6 cars 3 or 4 laps into the session I thought it was a better idea to find my way through them instead of sitting back and giving my self space because if i gave myself space i would just close back up to them before my ”fast” lap ended the gamble kind of paid off but at the same time it didn’t pay off as I only got past the whole group on the final bend of the penultimate lap so this only gave me the 1 clear lap but with 2 races and the 2nd fastest lap in the session determining the grid for the 2nd race I needed 2 clear laps to really have a shot at anything decent for both races, but even with that I still managed 3rd for race 1 and 8th for race 2 both of which are better than any previous championship grid positions so everything looked like it was starting to come together!

Sunday – Race 1 – DNF
For race 1 I started on the inside of row 2, When the lights went out Paul Hinson got a bit of a slow start and left a mr2 sized gap on the inside which I decided I would take having clearled Paul before the braking zone at turn 1 I was in 2nd just behind James Cross but then Paul came from quite a long way back out braking me and managed to slot his car up the inside of mine as I turned in for the apex. As you can expect I was quite surprised to see a Yellow car on the inside of me while I was at the apex of the 1st corner I gave him a little bit of room to avoid any contact but as we were most of the way around the corner I wasn’t able to brake and duck behind him when he squeezed me off the track on the exit, I didn’t realise how wet the grass still was and when I tried driving along it to rejoin my rear wheel just span up and the car swapped ends with me then facing sideways across the track with 26 cars still to go past me luck obviously wasn’t on my side as Roland Wilkingson hit into the left rear corner of my car because he had no time to react causing too much damage for me to continue in that race.

Sunday – Race 2 – 9th
The time inbetween the 2 races was spent fixing the car so we could race. Thankfully Clive Morphett had a spare trackrod to lend us so we fitted that but there was a large amount of time spent hammering the chasis to get it back to roughly where is should be so the exhaust could mount onto the car, this took up most of the break and left us with no time to do the rear tracking but the main thing was we were racing!

Starting 8th for this one and getting a poor start I had my work cut out for me to get back upto where I should have been, the rear alignment was quite far out too and you could tell by the handeling on the majority of the corners the back of the car was trying to swap ends which was loosing me a very large amount of time every lap! despite this thought I had a fairly strong race and finished 9th. It was a lot of hard work just to get the car to go around a corner so we were pleased despite how promising the day looked from qualifying.

Review
Overall the weekend was very strong and showed we have the potential to run at the front hopefully this is a sign of things to come at Cadwell park.