Disappointing start to South West Series - 30 / 10/ 05

This weekend the first round of the 2005/06 South West Indoor Series was held at the Acorn Centre in Torquay. Despite not getting home till around 3am on sunday morning after Dads racing on saturday night in Birmingham I felt pretty confident, the car had been very good last week and we now had three new sets of GP3700 cells from Demon Products.

Practice it was when we tried to go out for practise we noticed the new cells fitted in the car the opposite way to the old ones, which meant the wires wern't long enough so after a quick bit of soldering we made it out for the end of practse to scrub in the control Sorex tyres.

Qualifying

Into qualifying then and after the tyres had finished wearing in during the first minute the car felt just as it did last week but I was noticing a distinct lack of acceleration. We believed this must have been down to the new cells as we were on the same track with the same car/motor/gearing as the previous week. During the four qualifying rounds we tried different gearing, cooling, motors and just about everything in the search for acceleration but we just couldn't find it and ended up 6th on the grid and miles behind front row men Justin and Mark which was disappointing.

	Final So we lined uo for the final, Justin and Rod followed by Mark, Michael, Malcolm, me, then Sean and Wayne who was enjoying a great start to the series. Into turn one and Mike spun before being collected by Malcolm which left just enough room for me to sneak through and move upto 4th although I caight the barrier as I went through and I thought i'd damaged the left front suspension.
Ice packs for the motor next week!

(It actually turned out the bottom shell clip had gone and the shell was running on the tyre under right handers) The car certainly didnt want to turn into the right handers but now with the old batteries back in the car was back to having a fair amount of acceleration so I was able to hold down fourth although Malcolm wasn't far behind. Moving on in the race and Rod ran into trouble letting me take third but with him rejoining right behind me he soon found a way past after a few laps as I struggled to turn into the right handers. It was only a little while later though when Rod clipped a barrier and spun letting me back upto third with Malcolm and the recovering Rod now fighting for fourth behind me. With all this going on I was able to cruise to the end in an unexpected (but after qualifying, pleasing) third position behind Justin and Mark

So, next week we're again at the Acorn Centre in Torquay for round 3 of the TRAK Indoor series, fingers crossed the new batteries will begin to work as well as I'm sure they can,

See you next time :-)

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