South West Series heads to St.Austell - 13 / 11 / 05

It's 3am on sunday morning and i've just got home from Dads saturday night meeting at Birmingham....then the alarm went off, no it can't be time to get up already! Unfortunatly it is so time to load the car up and set off for todays destination, St.Austell - South West Series Round 2.

After encountering heavy traffic caused by a serious accident on the way to St.Austell we arrived a little later than planned although the same could be said for many others and we were still able to grab a quick practise before qualifying. In first practise the car had a little too much push but we'd solved that for second practise and the car was handling well, taking St.Austells notorious bumps in its stride.
		Drivers rostrum at St.Austell

Qualifying

Round 1 of qualifying then and it went pretty well, 2nd place on 19 laps in 301 seconds behind the flying Justin. Into round 2 and an improvement with 20 laps in 312 seconds although I dropped to 4th behind Russel and Mike. We made some changes for the third and final qualifier and managed to go a second faster although I did lose myself 4 or 5 seconds when I parked it nose first into a barrier, never a good thing to do! With the late start we were unable to hold four qualifiers so a short practise session was held before the finals.

Dad, where's the front end!?!? (Dads racing at Birmingham on Saturday night wasn't without incident...)

We took this oppurtunity to try some different brushes (Schumacher Putham's) Mike had run these brushes before and found they had originally given him interference, especially when the serrartions wore from the brush, as my car had been fine with them in practise we decided to give them a go in the final.

Final We were away at the buzzer and all 8 cars flew though the first corners without incident. It was a close race and for the first lap or two I was looking for a way past Mike who was running third. Our pace soon levelled though but as the race wore on I found I was getting more and more interference, I should have listened to you Mike, you said that would happen! ;-)

Fortunatly I was able to make it home in 4th place which wasn't bad but wasn't exactly anything to get excited about either. I did a lot of close running with Russel in practise and at least I know where I need to be faster now so I'll have to try and do something about it for next week, the question is...what?

Also it seems this site is beginning to generate quite some interest these days, both amongst local drivers (including the ever desperate for a mention duo of Sean and 'I miss touring cars' Adrian!) and fellow RC enthusiasts across the country. As a result the site will be getting a few exciting new features during the coming week - watch this space! :-)

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