62nd Birkett 6hr Relay – Silverstone

For the 2nd year running I decided to enter the Birkett 6hr relay race at silverstone with Dawn GP, After last years 3rd place in class we all had high hopes of fighting for the win in class this year.

The Master Plan
Once again the team was set up and organised by Dawn Bryant and the team members also remained the same from last year, James Cross, Steve Lumley, David Bryant, Rob Barnett and Me.

The plan for the race was for James to take the start, followed by me, Rob, David and then Steve would finish the race this was if everything was to go to plan. Sadly this plan never happend because everything that could go wrong did. The problems for the team all started on Friday when David’s car decided to develop a oil leak and this wasn’t fixed for morning practice thankfully though we fixed it in time for the race. The master plan took a major hit during morning practice as James’ car developed a overheating issue so he was unabled to take the start so Steve took the start and all of the mechanics in the garage jumped on James’ car to try and get it fixed for the 2nd stint of the race.

The Race
So with Steve starting the race and our handycap putting us towards the back of the grid everyone was excited about the 6hrs ahead that was until we saw a caterham wheel fly up in the air before turn 1 as it turned out there was a massive crash which started with a radical stalling on the start line and getting hit by a 206, in total 7 cars were too damaged to carry on in the race but lucky for the teams, it being a relay race they had 3 or 4 other cars to choose from to take the restart from the pits. Thankfully Steve got through the carnage ok and managed to take the restart normally. So for the next hour we were glued to the timing screens watching steve progress and his times getting better lap after lap, until he got hit by a caterham and damaged his tracking, we noticed his laptimes drop slightly but we didn’t know he had a problem until we pitted for James to go out.

James’ car was believed to have been fixed and 20 mins into his stint he was still running strong and the fastest championship mr2 on the track so we thought everything was ok and let him get on with it. at about 35 – 40mins james suddenly appeared in the pit lane and rob went out as he was sat in the reserve spot at the time. It turned out the car wasn’t fit to race and it overheated.

So now the ‘master plan’ was truly screwed up so some serious number crunching was going on in the garage to work out how the rest of the race should go, this ended up with me being sat in the reserve spot when Rob pitted under the safety car with a slightly damaged gear box.

So now I was covering Rob who had been covering James who had actually gone out 15mins early due to a timing error with the red flag. As soon as the safety car pitted I put my foot down and got on the pace pretty quickly laping in high 2:38′s but about 6 laps in my drop link snapped off of my strut all I knew was going through maggots and becketts my car suddenly lost balance and the front end was now feeling very soft so I thought I would see how the laptimes go before making a decision to pit or not. Obviously the car didn’t want to be on the track as I was driving past the new pit complex and everything suddenly died on me and started up again, it did this again down the wellington straight now knowing my laptimes would be massivly off and having a risk of getting stranded on the track I pitted and Steve who was waiting in reserve went out.

So now it was Steve covering me and I had covered Rob who was Covering James. It wasn’t looking great at this point considering a lot of teams had only done the one pit stop yet we had done the amount we had planned to do for the whole race. Steves car still with his tracking issue seemed to get through the rest of that stint alright and then David went out and got told to go until his out of fuel as this is the only way we could get to the finish without spending too much more time in the pits, Davids car also managed to hold out so everything was starting to look up and our luck was changing as we had climed back up the order to 2nd or 3rd in class on handycap. But then when David drove past flashing his lights indicating he was almost out of fuel he got shoved off the track at the far end of the circuit on his in lap not knowing until about 2 laps later Rob went out so having spent 2 laps in the gravel we dropped down the order again.

Rob drove really well during his stint and considering he was nursing a gearbox issue put in some pretty good laptimes. When his stint was over it was my turn to go out again having fixed the droplink problem and assumed that the engine cutting out was a dodgy battery connection I felt possitive on regaining some of those lost places before taking the flag at the end of the race, yet again our run of bad luck hit it turns out the engine cutting out wasn’t caused by the battery it was caused by something to do with the kill switch me already being on track and cutting out several times during my 1st full lap I lost loads of time but made it back to the pit lane but came to a full stop at the opposite end of the pit lane, no knowing if my team had noticed I was stopped down there I had to push the car the whole length of the pits and with a full tank of fuel that was not easy! The guys at Rogue motorsport gave me a hand when I was going past their garage though which was very appriciated!

When we got back to the garage Steve was sent out yet again to cover me and he then finished the race from there, so a rather disapointing race after the high expectations from last year, I believe at the end of the race we were in 46th place overall not a very exciting position but hopefully we had all of the bad luck this year and covered our share of bad luck for next year too!

Season Review coming soon!