What a weekend that was…
All pre race preparations completed (lots of hours fixing and remediating bits on the car) collecting up the necessary tools and running infrastructure for the weekend all completed by the Wednesday evening. Travelling to the meeting was hindered by a truck flat battery and then a stop over at the DVSA to be weighed (and some bits offloaded) prior to arriving at the track at 19:30.
We quickly assembled the rest of the pop up garage in the corner of the paddock fondly referred to as the Paddock Bend Club throughout the weekend.
Friday was dry and sunny and the car ran really well expectations for qualifying on Saturday were good Sam didn’t match his times from Friday but did manage to get up to 14th although his time was 0.4 seconds down on Fridays testing.
The race itself was good (we didn’t see much from the pit wall but it was being live streamed) with Sam progressing up to P11 by the end of the day. We think we were impacted by some necessary changes on Friday evening but aside from that the team was positive on Saturday night as Sam’s P11 - 1st in class finish was enough for a direct entry into the Semi Final on Sunday.
We ate well Saturday night with a Chinese buffet being served in the garage.
Sunday was gloomy and by the time the semi final arrived the rain had started, Sam was placed 16th on the grid confident that he would do well. An initial gain installed positive vibes in the team, although as the rain intensified Sam started dropping back through the pack. The race ended with Sam 20th a long way off where we were last year. De-briefing back in the garage exposed a clutch failure which meant splitting the car and investigating the cause. The clutch bearing was replaced, as was the clutch in a pretty impressive 1 hour 15 minutes. Sam just managed it onto the Historic grid although the car was making a noise which wasn’t familiar.
Our race weekend ended on lap 6 as Sam exited the track on Paddock bend, and reported after that the clutch had once again failed. We packed up the garage in the wet and trundled down the road. Whilst the weekend didn’t end the way we wanted, but the fact we’re back self running and were (at points) competitive is a huge positive.
There’s some more work to do to remediate the issues from the last race but we’re confident and plan to be at Silverstone next week.