The Racers Edge

At the age of 40, I decided to go motor racing - The ultimate mid life crisis.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Crail: Round 4

I think it's now mathematically impossible for us to retain our championship for the third consecutive year:-( I don't think we've got slower, but a few teams have really stepped up the pace.

Todays winners were SA racing with 2 wins and a second. MBM were second with a win and 2 seconds and F-Sport picked up their first ever podium with 2 3rds and a 5th. We managed a 3rd, 4th and 5th giving us another 4th:-)

It had started pretty well with me again having a decent qualifying, managing to get second, only 8/100ths from Ryan Cannon in the SA kart, who took pole.

Race 1 was fairly straight forward with Grant in the MBM kart getting past me on the first lap, and that was about it. No matter what I did I couldn't stop the front 2 pulling away about 2/10ths a lap. Ros was coming under pressure from Chris Miller in the Milady kart, but the flag came out early at 50 minutes and 3rd was our best result this year! The early finish was due to the timing computers being very late in arriving, courtesy of Mr Kirkcaldy who partners Chris in the Milady kart.

Race 2 was the usual reverse grid - I got a poor start and was hit 4 times on the first 2 laps, but managed to make my way to 4th. Ros again brought us home in that position.
It's really strange, last month Ros was about 5/100ths quicker than me and we did nothing to the kart, even running the same tyres, yet I was 2 tenths quicker today?????

Anyway, for race 3 I lined up 3rd, but again got hit on lap one, dropping me to 7th - I quickly managed to get back to 5th and then past Alan K in the Milady kart to put me in 4th - After the change overs, Ros and Chris Miller had a great battle for the last 15 mins with Chris taking the position on the last lap, which bumped us off of the podium.

We need to test - That's the bottom line, but Ros is just too busy, so c'est la vie!

I asked a few folk about the idea of having a Crail based team at Le mans next year, and it seems it may happen. The only downside is that I might not be quick enough to make the team - I guess we'll see if interest turns into a real team. My picks would be - well that shall remain with me for the moment - any suggestions?

August sees the first Crail ProKart festival, with races happening over 2 days. Looking forward too it!

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Le Mans 24 hour

When I stated out in motorsport in 2000, I had a list of places I wanted to race. These include Spa, Monaco, Monza, Silverstone and Le Mans. I've managed to do most and on the weekend of 4-6th of July, I added Le Mans to the 'done' list, but not the car circuit:-(

A few months ago I saw a post on the UK karting site in which a team was looking for drivers for the annual 24 hour Prokart race at the Alain Prost circuit in Le mans - I replied right away and eventually, I was in!

Friday was an early start with the flight to CDG Paris due to leave at 06:10 - I should have figured that a delay here would be a portent of issues to come but the pilot assured us we'd only be 10 mins late into Paris, and he was right. However, some twonk had left a bag in the customs area and the they shut it completely for 45 minutes, while they blew the offending item into 1000 pieces. In the current climate, understandable, but it meant I missed my train:-( So I eventually got to the circuit at 16:20 and it was straight out for 10 laps or so to try and learn the circuit. Right away the kart felt very lose at he rear and when I returned to the pits, I asked for the rear to be narrowed. The kart's owner, Chris Bancroft siad that the kart had felt much better on the previous days, and a mid 57 second lap was what it could do. Even after having the rear of the kart narrowed, I could only manage a 58.4 - only 2 laps though, so I put it down to not knowing the circuit yet.

I had a good nights sleep and got back to the circuit for the drivers briefing at 08:30. The weather had turned nasty and the circuit was pretty wet, allthough the organisers didn't decalre it a wet practice, so everyone was on slicks! It was pretty slippy and Chris was
running around 1:18s. So then it was into qualifying and I managed to get us 15th with a 1:12 as the rain stopped.

The race order was to be Chris, followed by Chris Prior, me, Spiros Christoforo and Ashley Bablee.

The 2 Chris's did their stints which were mostly dry with a 40 minute wet spell for Chris B. The kart felt much the same as it had on friday, but with more laps I was able to get down to 58.00 (the on-board timer gave me this time on 3 seperate laps!) and it was comfortable running 58.3-5s. We were getting hammered on the straights where we just didn't have the pace of the front running guys.

Latter, while watching Spiros and Ashley, you could see that about half way down the back straight we seemed to stop accelerating and the front runners would take 4-5 kart lengths out of us at that point! I had also found that I couldn't brake as late as a I wanted without a nasty grinding/mechanical rattle coming from the rear, which I thought was a failing clutch. Still, I could drive round it and it was a fairly un-eventful session. I was a bit concerned that I couldn't get into the 57's as the kart had been doing that sort of time in Chris B's hands earlier in the week, but I put it down to 'the noise'. I told the team about 'the noise' but as we thought as the pace was reasonable, we'd continue, in 12th place.

Spiros took over, but his lap times varied from high 58's to low 61's, and at the change over, he said 'the noise' was getting worse, and it was affecting the pace. Ashley fared no better with low 59's to high 61's!

About 10 minutes before Chris B was due to take over from Ashley for his second stint, we decided to get the kart onto the stand during the changeover to see if we could figure out if it was a failing clutch. It quickly becam aparent what the problem was, the rear axle's centre bearing had come competely loose from it's mounting and it was free to move as it liked. That took us around 15 mins to fix and dropped us back to 21st.

We changed the order slightly with Chris B, Chris P, Spiros (with a new set of tyres), Me and Ashley making up the next rota.

Chris B ran consistent low 59's, which kinda pointed to the fact that fixing the bearing, hadn't got the pace of the kart back to where it had been earlier in the week. Chris P faired no better, but I hoped Spiros would perform better on new tyres, but it wasn't to be.

It's always difficult trying to figure out what's going on when you're not in the kart, but is was fairly plain that somethimg wasn't right as soon as I got in for my second stint at 02:00 on Sunday morning. Even with a tiny steering input, the engines just seemed to bog down really badly and I struggled to do high 58's. By 80 minutes into my stint it was getting way worse, and then the right hand engine started reving very high as if the chain had come off, and then it fixed itself??? This pattern continued for 3 or 4 laps and I was losing 3-4 seconds. I tried to signal to the pits but I got no response and eventually the engine just stopped and I had to come in, to find all of the team asleep! I was not best pleased.

Each engine has a front and back engine mount and the bolt on front one on the RHS engine was almost compeltely out, allowing the engine to pivot on the rear mount. This was what had caused the worsening performance and eventual failure as the other mount point gave up and broke. It took us 10-15 minutes to fit a spare engine and I went back out to complete a double stint. The kart handled a bit better, but I could do no better than a 58.5, but given that it was the dead of night, it was what I expected.

After my double stint, that was it for me and we had a fairly clean run from that point, apart from the same engine mount falling off the kart, right in front of us with 4 laps to go. I latter found out that they found a crack in the chassis at the left rear of the kart, which explains why the kart lost pace - Chris B had done a 57.5 on the Wednesday or Thursday, and his fastest race lap was a 58.7, so 1.2 seconds would seem about what the damaged chassis was costing us.

It alway nice to be the quickest driver in the team, but I'd rather be the slowest, and get a better result :-) We finished 23rd - without the problems we'd have made the top 10, but it wasn't to be.

For next year. I really want to try again, but wouldn't it be great if we could get a team from the drivers at Crail?

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Crail: Round 3

June 22nd: Round 3 certainly didn't feel much like summer! I endured constatnt heavy rain for 90% of my journey from Glasgow, with only the last few miles being rain free. Even so, the circuit was very wet and practice and qualifying were really about getting a clean lap at the right time. I'm usually pretty good in the wet so I was disapointed with only being 4th on the grid. The race was packed with incident, with a clean start followed by the track drying for the next 35 mins or so. I dropped back from the front 3 at the start, but as the track dried, I was begining to pull them back in, but the the rain returned and that was it. I did the full race and 4th was a reasonable start witch Millady winning by large margin.

Allthough the rain had now stopped, everybody started race 2 on wets - Ros had a good start but after about 20 minutes,running in 5th, he stopped on circuit. He made it slowly back to the pits, with a broken chain. We had to change the sprocket and decided to send Ros back out with slicks to see how he went. After about 10 minutes he came back in, having failed to beat the fastest time posted on wet tyres by 0.02 seconds:-(. It just felt wrong!

For race 3, we decided to make some major changes to the kart setup and use it as a test session, as we haven't tested since August 2007!.

Due to the failure to finish race 2, we started in 13th place, but Ros was flying, and in 20 mins made it up to 4th and when he pitted he was only 5 seconds behind Chris Miller in his new MS (which was balistic in the wet, winning race 1!). Unfortuneatly, Ros overshoot the weighbridge and we lost roughly 10 seconds during the change. The kart felt really good and I was slowly catching Chris, but ended up 7 seconds down at the flag, but we did manage to post the fastest race lap, which at least means we have a good starting point next month.

In 3 years of racing at Crail, this is without doubt our poorest run of results with 2 DNFs in the last 6 races. It would take a miricale for us to retain the championship, but you never know.........