This weekend is the opening round of the Monoposto Championship 2010 at Brands Hatch, on the short Indy circuit. It will be my first time here since 2007, when we attended a SEMSEC meeting as my fourth ever race, where I qualified and finished in 6th place, behind Jedis and a March F2 car.  The race was notable for the little battle I had with Kevan McLurg in his F300 Dallara – a battle that I came out on top from after several overtakes when he spun off at Paddock Hill Bend.

My best time that weekend was a 48.56, which was a second off the pace from Monoposto’s 2006 meeting.

So what can we expect of me this year?  Well, I’m better than I was, and the Dallara is a much quicker car than the Reynard, so one would have to hope to be in the 47 second bracket in the dry. Jeremy Timms, Neil Harrison and Richard Purcell – all in Dallaras now – will be keen to be the pacesetters too, so a great result won’t be easy by any means.

However, the weather forecast suggests that it will be damp – particularly in the afternoon – in which case lap records will be out of the question.  Whilst I do enjoy the rain, and tend to go quite quickly in it, it’s also much less predictable. Bearing in mind the relative pace of everyone at the start of the year is never predictable anyway, it’s anyone’s guess how we will all fare.

Jeremy Timms had a poor wet race last year at Silverstone after a slightly dodgy tyre call, and he’ll be hoping to put that right. Neil has won most of the recent wet races he’s competed in, so will clearly be a threat. And Richard’s Dallara won’t be quite as sensitive to the rain as his modified Formula Vauxhall and could be very quick indeed (although it’s early days for his Dallara career, one can never count him out).

So quite simply we’ll all have to wait until Sunday afternoon to know how well we do. I’ll do my best to update my Twitter feed with news, developments and results from the meeting, and any pictures or videos will of course end up on here as usual.

If you aren’t doing anything this weekend, why not pop down to Brands on the Sunday and support Monoposto, club racing in general and, of course, me!