MOLERACING 2014 - 1st 3 rounds

Winter Developments

4th overall in last years SBD British Sprint Championship was celebrated at the awards dinner - although
I did get a lot of abuse for my shirt!
After the major expense of the new engine, I'd blown my budget midway through 2013! Mike Musson kindly helped with a lot of suspension analysis and we found a few issues that have now been corrected.
A new clutch hydraulic slave cylinder and having the shock absorbers serviced all has made the car much better to drive so far this season.

Click here for complete PDF of Moleracing event report and stats.







Rockingham
Never been here before and it was a hot spring day for a club meeting shakedown. Terry and Graham in the V8 Lola also had the same idea, and I ended up 2nd overall behind Terry. But it was a useful opening event to test things out.

Castle Combe
A favourite circuit and also the fastest in the calendar. We had a great evening celebrating Mikes 60th - walking to the local restaurant and Mike treated Martin and I to a very nice meal, and maybe I did mix my drinks a little too much, and I do confess to feeling queasy until lunchtime. Anyhow, I'd done enough to qualify for the run off and scraped in in 124.48 in 10th place. Feeling better and with new tyres, a new PB for the venue and a 122.47 and 5th place.


Pulled some good points out the bag with a late flourish! An on-board video can be seen by clicking here. Note to self - don't start an event hungover again!












Croft
I was good to be back at this Northern circuit after a 4 year break, and also great to be supported by Chris and Jonny, who maintained and prepared the car, the datalogging and ECU software updates faultlessly all day.

The circuit is a medium speed venue - top speed of 130mph, but has many challenging flowing bends. A good entry 90 plus and a class of 10 2 litre cars. My previous PB was 74.20 set in '09, so I was confident of beating this, but also hoping to get good overall points in the run off. Timed run 1 was a good start at 72.20 and just 1/2 second behind class leader Mark Smith. I was told he was feeling under pressure as he put the best run off tyres for T2 and would have gone better had he done the wheel nut up properly! After a banker 1st run off, Jonny handed me the laptop whilst strapped in the car getting ready for a do or die final run. He had analysed the data logging traces and identified what areas needed working on and basically, it was braking - much less of it - just carry the speed – easier said than done!

I gave it everything and tried not to 'leave anything on the table' and was rewarded with a 70.57 just a snip behind Marks 70.33, to finish 5th overall. Up front Heather beat her dad in the big Gould with a new lap record of 67.49 to take the lead in the British championship!

Lydden
The forecast was bad - or good, if like me you like driving in the rain. I decided to bite the bullet and invest in a new set of wet tyres for the weekend, and £1010 later, I had a brand new set of slicks, hand cut into wets and hoped the forecast was correct.

Assisted by Martin again, we arrived and set up the night before - the car causing lots of interest from the Apex festival goers - perhaps 1000+ having a good time over the weekend. A low beer evening (not wanting to repeat Castle Combe hangover again), early to bed and then the rain started, yippee!

The SBD team had frantically worked on Bills car - changing clutch and machine the cylinder head - on the Friday, but at around midnight they gave up the assembly due to problems - it was all too tight, they had a few hours sleep then got up early to get to the circuit. I on the other hand was lying nice and snug in bed as they clattered and unloaded!

I was pleased to be lying 1st after the wet practice and then again 1st after timed run 1, however it was now rapidly drying and the slicks were put on. 3rd overall for timed run 2 wasn’t too shabby. Poor Terry Holmes had a spin on both runs, and the pre event favourite was reduced to trolley dolly role for Graham! The 1200 mile round trip for heather and Colin meant they hadn’t entered and so good points were on the cards.

Spurred on by the watching eyes of John of K2 Consultancy and family, Martin and Ian, we had a good plan, and this feedback led to a final run off time that was 2 secs inside my PB and I bagged 2nd place, just 1.2secs behind Mark Smith who took his first British win. Craig from SBD was less than 0.2 behind me then Steve Broughton in the new Dallara, so it was an SBD 1-2-3-4!

What then followed was a first, the UK Anti Doping agency then squirreled the top 3 away for drugs testing and breathalysing. Pleased to record 0.00 on the blower, but the sample took a lot longer to produce than I'd hoped for, but an hour later, my A and B samples were signed sealed and delivered! I await the results.

Steve

Click here for complete PDF of Moleracing event report and stats.