Left Saturday morning with a view to doing a bit of testing on the afternoon, and to remind myself where the track goes. Cadwell is one of my favourite circuits but it is also probably one of the hardest. Make a mistake and you don't have a lot of room to get out of trouble.
First time out on full slicks as my new rear wheels arrived on Friday.
Arrived in very good time and got the car off the trailer, and ready to run, time for a bacon butty and to go and sign on...
Spent the first 10 minutes of the session going round working out where the track went, then I noticed 100°C on the temp gauge, better come in and investigate - no water...
When I had removed the front end the other week, I must have introduced an air lock and was a bit short of water, left it 20 mins to cool down a bit and blagged some water wetter from Simon and topped it up, took rather a lot ... whoops... kinda glad I spent the extra 30 quid on eBay and got the temp gauge...
Cedric had been timing me at around the 2 minute per lap region - not exactly fast.
Went out for second session, was getting faster, and then the roof popped off, the rear part where it is glued to the rear clam came undone and it made a nasty cracking noise as it broke free. Gave the marshals a bit of a laugh as I came in, my hand holding the roof on. Fixed it with some cable ties around the roof and rollcage. That's enough excitement for one day - off for some beers..
Sunday: Qualifying:
Scrutineering wasn't 100% successful, he didn't like the fact that I don't have a rear window, and insisted that I blocked the hole up with something, spent 40 minutes with fire cloth and gaffer tape blocking up the hole. - gave me my "ticket to ride"
Very foggy, did 3 laps behind the pace car, managed to spot the Mondeo in the barriers after the first corner - apparently he was late leaving the assembly area and pushed a little too hard to catch up - whoops...
Race:
Went out in championship order once the fog had cleared. 9th on the grid If memory serves... got jumped by a few cars and spent the rest of the race keeping a red Clio Cup car behind me... At one point I backed off a bit and he got pretty close so I decided to press on a bit and opened up quite a good gap.
Going up the mountain was fun, flat out in second, on the rev limiter as the car went light over the brow and quickly select third, and do the wiggle thing through halls bends. try not to lock up the back end as rapidly down shift to second for the right hander at Barn, got it wrong a couple of time and smoked the rear tyres... was able to pull away from the Clio down the start finish straight - that's unusual for me... may have something to do with the car having the cats removed last week... or maybe its just faster...
Got lapped by the top 3 cars on lap 6 or 7 and then spotted the grey Noble on the side of the track, red flags - game over...
not a 100% success, but managed to get an idea how the slicks worked, and didn't stick it into the scenery.... now for Anglesey, big circuit hope to be able to let it rip a bit, gotta go testing first though, I suspect just about everyone will be doing the same...