Sunday Morning, and Brass Monkeys is the least of it at Accommodation Road.
With a Brand new set of Ballistics all round, a New Surpass 10.5 Motor, 3 hole pistons & 250wt oil in the back shocks, and the JConcepts Diffuser bolted on, I felt like I might have finally a demon ready race day.
Practice only needed 3 laps to confirm whether I was in the right ball park. 19mm ride height, and every thing rear biased as possible, and bingo! Car pointed in the right direction and drivable in the slippy bits. A bit understeery and twitchy under braking but basically a good platform to start from.
3 Quali & 3 Finals meant that there wasn’t the opportunity to do potentially throw a round away on heroics. What I needed was bang in 3 clean consistent Qualis. Round 1, Gary put his Lewis Hamilton Pants on, and quite quickly disappeared. However, with a degree more control over the car, I got in a clean round that was close enough to pace to be happy.
Round 2 & 3 were much the same. Took a few liberties with the apexes here and there, but considering the frost was melting to a greasy dampness, Gary took off the Hamilton pants, handed them to Andy & Michael, and seemed to replace them with his Taki Inoue incontinence pads. While that was going on, I found I’d finally started to get my hands around the holy grail of RC Racing, consistency! The timesheets were showing these beautiful lists of 27,27,27,27,27! Spiffing!
Just missed the A final, by a margin of a Tie Break to Gary on his round 1 win and 2 Seconds Fastest round to Andy. But absolutely no matter, the platform was now there for a greasy Mendip, I can do something with that Long term.
Leg One of the finals, and by the end of lap 2, I dropped from Second to Seventh with a few dosy clangers, but I regrouped with a pedestrian but clean 3rd lap, and then settled nicely into my 27 second groove. With just that extra bit of control I’ve been missing, finding a path round slower cars became possible, I didn’t have an answer for Michael, with too much time gone already, but getting my second place back on merit of consistency was just the ticket.
Leg Two and Gary slipped up on the first lap, but Michael was really finding his way on the Mezzos, again, I was very chuffed to be able to keep pretty much out of harm’s way and by the end managed to nibble away at his lead, and sometimes a good tussle for second is more satisfying than blatting in an uncontested win.
Leg Three was legendary, Gary’s PR woke up again, I’d tweaked a bit more rake into the front suspension to find better turn in, and it was working nicely. Gary had a bit of a scrappy lap in traffic, and it was all there for the taking. I got a better traction onto the straight and it all went a bit Hakkinen Spa 2000. Of course, 4 corners later, I clipped a corner, rolled it, and Gary sailed back past. But the last minute or so was a right old ding dong to the line.
Fist bumps and smiles all round, and the happy thought that I’d found some consistency, made the right setup calls, and got the fastest lap in that final round.
Top Banana!