Speechless

With the car having had some 'fixes' applied to deal with the understeer issue, I arrived at Brands Hatch in a buoyant mood. Because of there being 40 entries, our qualification session was to be split into 2 sessions of 20 drivers with session B being the one for me.

The car felt a fair bit different compared with the Castle Coombe races, and I really enjoyed the 15 min session. Once all the times were correlated, I had managed 6th on the grid.

I got a great start passing 2 cars into Paddock Hill putting me in 4th, but on the way up to Druids, my engine hit the rev limiter and 2 cars shot past. I stayed in 6th place along the pit straight, but on the way into Paddock, again my car hit the rev limiter, and while tying to figure out what was going on, I went off into the gravel:-( I thought that was the race over, but under a red flag, they got me out and I was allowed to start from pit lane. )

So I joined that race last, and the problems continued. The engine should red line between 7.2 and 7.5k, but the limiter was kicking in around 6.3k. So, not much I could do but try to pass as many as I could. I was pleasantly surprised to manage a 10th place finish, but that feeling didn't last long.

On getting back to the pits, I told Alan (the guy who runs GAC Motorsport) the issue which he thought sounded strange. So we took the rear body work off and the problem was plain to see. The rotary dial on the limiter module was set just below 6.4k. Now, at first I figured that whilst checking/fixing something, it had been accidentally altered, but on further inspection, it's not possible to do this as the dial is very stiff. So the only conclusion is that someone had deliberately tampered with my car. What a crap thing to do - I hope I never find out who did it. Compared to qualifying I was around 0.5 seconds slower. which given the lack of power (V's make most of their power at the top of the rev range) was good.

But on refection, I wonder why it was done and is it worth continuing when this kind of thing can happen.

On a more serious note, there was a huge accident during the heat race (for those who didn't qualify well enough to go straight to the final) and Gethin Jones was hospitalised - My thoughts are with him.