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Castle Combe - 25th March 2006
After the best part of 5 months planning, blood, sweat and tears we are finally at Castle Combe for the first race of the season. The car is still setup from the testing we did on Thursday so I am confident in the car, the same can’t be said for the weather forecast. It seemed that every forecast I looked at said something different but the bottom line is that we will get rain some time during the day. The day starts off with signing on and scrutineering and I’m happy to report the car sailed through the latter which was a relief. At this stage the sky is pure blue with not a cloud in sight. Our qualifying session was scheduled for 10:50am and yes you guessed it, 10:30 am and the clouds start forming. For this meeting I am sharing a marquee with fellow competitor Simon Tilling who is also running a Radical Clubsport. There is a trace of rain in the air now and we are getting called up to the assembly area. Simon decides to fit wets on his Clubsport, I on the other hand cross my fingers and hope the rain will pass and stick with the slicks. After a brief wait on in the assembly area we are ushered onto the track for out qualifying session, straight away the car feels odd. It feels to stiff still and isn’t riding the bumps very well. Add to this when I get to the other side of the track the rain is failing, oh joy! I plug on with it, I need to put 3 laps in to qualify for the race so that is my goal. I watch my lap timer and its showing 1.18’s which is miles off the pace. As luck would have it the rain had stopped by the third lap so I set about getting a time in. The car still isn’t right but there isn’t a lot I can do about it now. I finally get the time down to a 1.15.278 which isn’t bad by still well over a second slower than testing. However it is good enough to put me 8th on the grid out of 20 cars. The start this year has been changed to a rolling start for the GT series, although the basics of a rolling start are straight forward the technicalities aren’t so clear cut. We have a long drivers briefing about what we can and can’t do on a rolling start and how the start will be organised. Basically everyone would start on their grid positions then follow a pace car around the track, the pace car would slow at Tower corner to bunch the grid up then it would finally pull off into the pit lane. The lead cars would then dictate the speed until the red lights go out and everyone floors it. One of the things you can’t do is start racing until you’ve passed the line and any that does will be penalised for it. There are exceptions i.e. the car in front has a problem but these have to circumstances agreed by the stewards at the end of the race….see I said it was complicated. Enough of this and back to the race! Our race was due to start at 15:40, I sat and watched the production BMW race and they were sliding around a fair bit on the now damp track. I decided that the main aim of today was to finish the race so with that in mind I decided to swap the slicks for wets. No sooner as we arrived back at the car the heavens opened, all that rain we didn’t get over the winter…it was now being delivered. The wet tyres on and the rain wasn’t easing up, we get the call to go to the assembly area where we sit in the rain waiting for the previous race to finish. Justin was being a good brolly girl keeping me dry. Soon we are being directed to the track and into our grid positions. The car is getting a bit hot at this stage so I kill the engine while the rest of the grid is formed and the officials are happy. The 1 minute board goes up so I start the engine, 30 second board and soon after the safety car pulls away and the front rows start moving, the row in front of me starts to move and I put the car into gear….nightmare the engine dies!! So I am now frantically trying to start the engine, after about 10seconds of button pushing the engine fires but I am now in 17th place. Back to the complicated rules I am not sure if I am allowed to over take the cars on the formation lap to get to my grid position. Airing on the side of caution I decide to stick at the back, the stall has also delayed 3 cars behind me as they weren’t sure if they could over take me when I was stationary. Because of the conditions we have 2 formation laps but the amount of spray coming off the cars in front meant that the train of cars got quite strung out. Finally we are coming around Camp ready for the start, I am behind a MR2 Turbo and I have Simon in his Radical behind me. We cross the line and I nail the throttle, the rear wheels spin and I’m not going anywhere, ease off the throttle and back on again and the little MR2 disappears into a cloud of Radical spray. I am aware that Simon is very close to me over Avon rise which I take quite cautiously this allows Simon to come up my inside, I give him room and slot in behind him. Wow…I am really racing! The spay is incredible and vision is almost non-existent following Simon. I’m up behind him going into Bobbies and he looses control of his car and spins into the undergrowth. I keep my toe in and power off down towards Camp. Combe has a reputation of being a tad slippery in the wet and I’ve experienced it first hand many time in the Elise and on a bike. However Avon wets were a revelation, they provided loads of grip and feedback which in turn increased my confidence in the car. I tried to get into a rhythm and keep all controls as smooth as possible, a couple of times I had to tell myself to calm down a bit. After about 8 laps I was up to 9th place and was gaining on 8th place man, Keith Sprules, in his 355 who’s well known for his wet weather driving. A LM5000 Prosport parked on the tyre wall at the Esses meant the safety car was called out. This was really the end of my attack on the 355 as I was caught behind the safety car and he was just in front of it. It took a couple of laps to clear the Prosport but during that time they had reduced the race to 10 laps because of conditions and fading light. The safety car pulls in and I come around Camp with a Jade on my tail ready to lap me. The spray from his car covered me and how I got around Folly corner I’ll never know, I now understand the term "blind faith". This was also the last lap, I spotted a black Radical bearing down on me but with confusion of the safety car I wasn’t sure if it was going to lap me or if he was a place behind me. There were no blue flags being shown to me so I assumed that he was behind me….I worked to keep him there and I crossed the line 0.5second ahead. I finished 9th out of 18 so I was reasonably happy with that considering I had started 17th. But I do wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t stalled…but isn’t motorsport full of "what if" questions. Spookily my first ever sprint back in 2004 was wet and I finished 9th overall….maybe this is a good omen? So in all a "baptism of fire" introduction to circuit racing, I think I had it all in that race so the next one should be a walk in the park! Let just hope the next one isn’t so wet and we can have some proper racing.
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