Thrashnals Round 1 - The carpet season begins - 17 / 10 / 07

It only seems like a few days ago we were at Ashby for the final BTCC meeting of the season but we’re already into the indoor season with Round 1 of the Thrashnals last weekend at Chippenham.

Turning up to the first meeting of a new season at a venue you’ve never been to with a car that’s never seen carpet is never an ideal scenario, especially when there’s no practice and you’re qualifying in the ‘A’s! But it all adds to the excitement ;-)

Adding further to the excitement was that at gone 9am we still couldn’t get the right gearing on the car. I’d forgotten I didn’t have any suitable pinions for indoors so borrowed one when I got there. It’s only then we realised we couldn’t mesh the motor with such a small pinion. The first solution was to change back to 48 pitch but we’d used so much thread lock on the layshaft to stop the pulleys slipping that the bloody thing wouldn’t come apart so we couldn’t swap spur gears either! Dad came to the rescue though and dremel’d the motor mount to allow the motor enough movement to mesh with the smaller gearing. As I’d forgotten to pack the dremel though we had to improvise and used a pinion attached to an old motor instead…..where there’s a will there’s a way ;-)

Here's a very poor webcam shot of my adjusted motor mount

It seems the level of competition wasn’t going to be quite as high as in previous years, not at this first meeting at least as there was a clashing ‘Carpet Wars’ meeting. Saying that there were still 33 entries in stock with some quality drivers like Marcus Askell and Tom Watts being the more fancied runners. From the south west we had me (obviously) as well as Shaggy who joined us for the day as well as Spanky and Paul Hopkins. Sean had booked in but had rather too much fun on the Saturday night and wasn’t feeling upto it come Sunday morning ;-)

Round 1 of qualifying then and it was nothing short of woeful, no grip front or back, no balance, no consistency, no anything really…..well a few good crashes but that was about it. Round 2 and with a load of changes all I did was give the car chronic understeer which I swapped to chronic oversteer in round 3 with a load more changes, bugger. Up at the sharp end Marcus Askell was leading the way while Shaggy was top south west driver with his very sorted looking Cyclone. Fourth after round 1 he’d been bumped back a little with a few unlucky qualifiers but was still well inside the top 10 and looking fast. Also in the top 10 were Spanky, Paul and me for some unknown reason in 10th.

 

After getting the car closer in the 4th qualifier I was fairly confident about the 5th and final qualifier, had to be really as I was 9th or 10th overall before the run so needed to improve to stay in the top 10. From the start and the car was feeling fairly okay, nothing more than that but enough to get round at a fairly brisk pace whilst keeping out of the barriers and everyone elses accidents which was enough to give me 3rd on the grid behind Marcus and Tom. What a save from earlier on in the day! The even better news was that all four south west drivers were in the ‘A’ with Spanky 6th, Shaggy 8th and Paul in 9th.

On with the finals then and I managed to make it round the first few corners okay but then I rubbed a barrier and slid across the track which let a few cars go past and a few more went past as I got pinballed around a bit which was my fault for making the first mistake. Once everything had calmed down I was back in about 8th which wasn’t ideal but the car was feeling pretty good, a bit nervous maybe but fairly quick so I could begin making my way back upto the front. In truth I didn’t have to overtake too many cars on track, just wait until they made a mistake then pick my way past which was enough to get me upto 3rd overall at the end, back where I started which I was happy with. With two other drivers running GT style shells and thus not counting for points I believe that gives me second but the results aren’t out yet so we’ll have to see. Spanky did well to come home in fifth after we spent a fair chunk of the race fairly close together and Shaggy thought he had 6th place in the bag until he was disqualified for failing the ride height check :-( And sorry Paul I have no idea where you finished, get rid of that white shell, I was having trouble seeing which car you were all day ;-)

An enjoyable strat to the indoor season then. There’s a few changes to the make to the car for round 2 on the 28th October so hopefully we can go a place or two better,

See you then.

(Apologies for the lack of photos this week, my cameras bust after it filled up with water at Donnington and there wasn't anyone else taking photos so i've resorted to a load of old pics to brighten the page up ;-)

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