Motors TV Live Race Day – Castle Combe

So me and my dad crammed in a load of work into a very short space of time between brands hatch and this race at castle combe. The car wasn’t looking perfect but it looked goodenough and it was great to see a load of shocked faces when we rocked up in the paddock.

This race was a one off live televised race. It wasn’t part of the championship so a lot of people didn’t turn up to race instead saving their money to put more of an effort into the championship rounds. However with my start to the season we decided that we might as well just enjoy a few races this year instead of trying to do all of them.

The format was simple, 15minute qualifying session followed by a 18minute race.

I had never been to castle combe before so qualifying was interesting in the wet. I needed to make sure the car was ok before pushing it I then needed to adjust to the track and then finally push for the best possible lap time. This was quite difficult to squeeze into 15minutes.

Qualifying
So I got out on track and took the 1st lap fairly steady with a little bit of weaving checking everything felt like it was attached to the car. Then I pushed on and got used to the track. My fastest lap came close to the end of the session I feel my final lap was faster but I came up to a lot of traffic at the end of the lap. This said I still put it 3rd on the grid which was a great result considering what had happend!

The Race
Starting P3, we did a fairly fast warm up lap so we could see what the track conditions were like. which was massively different to what we had experianced in qualifying. The track was practically dry which wasn’t what we had set the car up for. So I was praying for rain at this point!

As the race started I got a decent jump but sadly the others around me got a slightly better launch, I fell back to 4th and at the 1st corner I was almost down to 5th as the Mk3 of Stuart Nicholes tried to overtake. I hung around the outside and maintained the position but the rest of the lap ended up being side by side action between me and stuart. It wasn’t until the final chicane where I thought were loosing too much time here I better let him go. I didn’t fight though the chicane but this led to me getting a poor exit out of the chicane and Patrick quickly snuck past.

As the race went on I slowly fell backwards assuming this was down to the setup we had on the car. It later turned out to be a sheared drive shaft nut and the left rear wheel was only held in place by the brake caliper. So finishing 8th and 6th in class turned out to be a VERY good result!

Bellow is the video of the race from castle combe by motors TV