Another Day Older

How come when it's your birthday, you have to buy cakes for everyone else? I thought it was my turn to get hugely expensive gifts - Doesn't matter though, as the bakery had a load of old stuff from yesterday, which I got real cheap :-)

46 - How depressing

Almost Perfect

Today was the last round of the Crail winter endurance series, which was made more interesting by Neil & Craig having their first outing at Crail. I did all of the practice on the short circuit and Ros did the qualifying on the long circuit. I say short and long - The short one is my favoutite of the two as it flows really well, whilst the long configuration has 2 hairpins which I'm not too keen on.

Practice & qualifying were on a wet circuit and we made 6th on the grid. Because I'm lighter than Ros, I now always do the first 30 minutes of the hour race (coz as fuel gets used up the kart gets lighter)and with an empty tank (or as empty as it gets by the end of a race) I'm just under the 180kg weight limit.

For Race 1 (long circuit) the track was still wet and it was pretty good with me making my way into the lead by the half hour - Ros then took over and we finished a close second, also setting the fastest lap of the race.

By now the track was dry, so it was on with the slicks. The grid for race 2 (short circuit) is a reverse of race 1 so I started 15th. I got lucky in avoiding an incident on the first lap and made it up to third behind Grant (MBM) and Chris (Milwalk) - we then swapped places loads of times over the next 20 laps - Good clean racing! - It just so happened that I was in the lead, by around a half a second, when Ros took over. I had set a lap 2/10ths quicker than anyone else during my stint, which Ros predictibly beat by 4/1000ths on the second last lap! A great win for us (RD Racing).

Race 3 (long) saw me on pole and I made a pretty good start ond had a good lead by the end of lap one. I knew Grant and Chris would be chasing me hard so I really pushed for the first 15-20 laps and got a 6-8 second lead over the pair of them. Then I nearly went off when the brake pedal started vibrating badly every time I hit the pedal - Because of this , I assumed, I was losing 3-5/10ths a lap and after another 15 laps the two of them got past me, but I managed to stay within a second of them till the change over. Ros got up to first just as it started to rain and he was powerless to stop Mur (MBM) from getting past him with 5 laps to go. So second in this race. After the race we found the problem was with one of the brake pads binding which is why it was costing us time.

Overall, we set 2 of 3 fastest laps, and had a first and two seconds - enough to win the day overall. We'll find out later where we finished in the overall championship.

Neil & Craig had a good first race finishing 10th overall and gaining some great experience of endurance racing.

Next weekend it's off to Raceland for the last Super GP in the 'broken' karts.

Post Holiday Blues

I'bve been away sking in Canada for the part couple of weeks - It started out badly as we got delayed for 12 hours at Glasgow Airport, which meant we missed our connecting flight in London. So 52 hours after we left Glasgow, we finally made it to Whistler. After that it got way better, and we had a great time - loads of fresh snow and even 2 days of sunshine and blue skies. But now it's back to reality:-)

I've been fortunate enough to be selected to compete in the Thailand 24 hour endurance kart race, www.thailand24h.com , at the end of June. I'll be driving for F'Sport along with Neil, Craig, Jack and F'Sport MD, Ian - all of us over 40!

F'Sport are the racing team of Caledonia Park, who are completing the planning stages of the biggest kart circuit in the UK, which will be somewhere in the West of Scotland. (more details later. It's great to have to chance to race in this kind of event, but our primary goal is to raise cash for the orphans of Pattaya. You can help by going to www.justgiving.com/thailand24hr.

To get Neil and Craig up to race speed, they are racing together in the Crail endurance series this Sunday - They'll be in a proper race kart, which they are hiring from MBM, who are usually the team to beat, so lets hope the kart isn't 'too good'.

I'll post the race result late on Sunday - Last month Ros and I managed second despite an evil handling kart - Can we do better this month?

Some of our Karts are broken......

So, you're running the first round of your championship and the first thing you have to do is change to format of the event coz you don't have enough karts to have 8 heats. So you change it to 10 heats but still hve at least 2 karts per race break down or, even worse, be 3-4 seconds off the pace. What a shambles. Raceland are due to get their new karts in time for the May meeting, so I expect that the April round will be just as chaotic. For the first time in months, none of the karts I had broke down, but with a variance of 3-4 seconds between the best & worst karts that I had, it was not fun. However, because you can drop two rounds from the season, then March and April are the bets for mine. I seriously considered giving the April meeting a miss, but maybe I'll get lucky:-) And to really make it a great day, I got offered a drive in the Britsports championship in a supercharged Radical - The race is when I'm on holiday:-(( The one good thing is the news about the race in Thailand in June. More about that later.