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.........