'B' Final at STCC Round 1 - West London - 24 / 03 / 05

London baby! Okay I promise I won't say that again ;) So this is the story of Round 1 of the Clubmans Cup Championship held at West London on March 20th 2005.

Myself and Dad left for a friends house in Swindon on Saturday evening after somehow fitting all the RC gear and a giant gazebo into the tiny Fiesta. Arriving in Swindon Saturday night meant we only had around an hour or so journey in the morning to the track - which is good as we planned to be trackside at around 7am. So we departed Swindon in the all too early hours of Sunday and arrived at the West London Track at 7am where the biggest challenge of the day was awaiting us - putting up the gazebo! ;)

Suprisingly the huge thing went together pretty quickly and after it had been tied down to the fence / car and anything else we could find to stop it blowing away all was well! ;)

Practise

After booking in we got the chance to head out on track for first practise at around 7:45am with the rest of the weary eyed looking RC drivers struggling to keep their cars in focus as they whizzed around the track. After all the preperation that had gone into the car during the week and with the new batteries / new tyres and not having raced outdoors since last summer it was anyones guess what was going to happen. And oh dear, the first lap was bad. The car was displaying the handling characterists of a barge, with bucket fulls of understeer and no traction. Fortunatly as the new tyres settled in things began to improve and the computer started reading out new personal best laps to confirm this, Ross Loram, New Fastest Lap, 21.3, 21.0, 20.5, 20.2, 19.8 and it was starting to feel better and better until a wheel departed company much to the amusement of the other drivers of the rostrum. Oh well, with the wheel re-attached / some higher gearing and a smothering of additive we were out for our second practise and now things were starting to really work with the best lap coming down to a 19.0, respectable given the cold weather and the hard control tyres.

Qualifying

So, we headed into the first qualifer full of optimism and despite losing a few seconds having a spin whilst working through from 7th we got back past everyone and won the heat with 16 laps in 308 seconds. Very pleasing, and I had a huge grin when I found we had set the 7th fastest lap of all 50 Stock entries after Round 1 of qualifying was complete.

Into Round 2 and I intended to lead off and run into the distance but it didn't go to plan as I was passed by three cars and finished the heat 4th and got knocked down the overall qualifying order from 11th to around 20th. We had gone 3 seconds faster, 16:305 instead of 16:308 but the others had just found more, we really needed to improve more in Round 3 so we did the motor and charged the new batteries harder this time. It did the trick and we moved back upto third in our heat after a terrific side by side dice for several laps with another car. We just scraped onto 17 laps in 17:316, another 5 second improvement which gave us 19th overall out of the 50 entries, placing us 9th on the grid in the 'B' Final.

Finals

The finals saw some fantastic racing and it was nice to be able to sit and watch 3 whole finals (30 cars) of people we'd outqualified before going out for our final! :) Starting off the back row I was in the midfield fight for most of the race with some tremendous door to door racing for 5th place. Eventually we finished 6th in a very close finish with the 5th to 8th placed cars covered by half a second, great racing! The start of the second race didn't go so well and after some first corner contact I was down in ninth place. The order stayed pretty much the same over the next 5 laps or so with all the cars and drivers being very equal but given a few more laps I made it up into 7th and was closing on the 4th placed battle at the end of the race only to run out of laps. The third final was again a good race with a 6th placed finish but if only it had been a lap longer I would have been 5th, a few laps more and I think I could have gone 4th but it wasn't to be. Unfortunatly despite my two results to count both being 6th places becuase of the very mixed finishing results of the other drivers we ended up with 9th in the B and 19th overall of the 50 drivers. Just a slightly better result in one of the finals and 5th would have easily been achievable.

So, we had a great days racing and i'm pretty confident we can go even faster next time as we fit bearings to the stock motor (as is allowed in the STCC championship) and go for some faster brushes. Look out for us!

(More pictures of this meeting will be added shortly)

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