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Hello!
Last race of the season was on Saturday 6th October - sadly no podium this time but still a very good race... Read on!
Castle Combe Special Gts race - 6th October
Qualifying
The day started with us shivering whilst we offloaded the cars from the truck.. The forecast of a warm day with broken cloud was as accurate as asking a taxi driver to guess the fare across London in rush hour!
Anyway, following some useful testing couple of weeks ago, I chose to run my tyre pressures a lot higher.. However, although the car felt good, the lap times were very slow - I qualified 8th :-(
Mark on the other hand chose to ignore my nonsense idea and ran his pressures as normal and qualified in a more respectable 6th place (behind lots of Ferraris and Caterham Superlights)
Race
As per tradition, I had a blinding start and overtook everyone by the first corner and assumed 1st place. Mark in the other Marlin had an equally good start and was running in 2nd place metres behind me. (must say it felt good to see a Marlin 1-2 on the track!)
We managed to keep the lead for about 2 laps but could not resist the 3 Ferraris and dropped to 4th and 5th place respectively.
About half way into the race I got held up behind a lapped car and this allowed a Caterham superlight to close in and overtake me (naive mistake on my part!).
He managed to open up a bit of a lead which took a couple of laps for me to close down again.. I did manage to catch up with him and examine the quality of the polish on his rear bumper for about 3 laps, but driving 10 feet behind a car is not the same as being able to overtake that car (especially when the cars are so evenly matched).
The race ended with me in 5th place. (Mark unfortunately developed an oil pressure problem and as a result lost Vtec and sadly ended up dropping many places.)
So that's it for this year.. I've ended up in 7th place overall, Mark in 8th (out of about 20 cars that entered our class)
Lap times - Best lap time set by me on Saturday was 1:14:9 (set on a 'slow' track - we reckon everyone was about 2 seconds off their usual pace due to cold weather and lack of grip on the day)
Worth noting that the circuit lap record at the end of 2006 season was 1:15:6!
Given that we started the season struggling to go below 1:21s we feel we made good progress and cannot wait until next year! Now that the cars are capable of setting blinding lap times and now that our reliability problems are behind us we feel that next year should bring many podiums and hopefully wins!
New season starts in April next year.. Until then..
Regards,
Dylan