Posts Tagged ‘Croft’
The penultimate meeting of the 2010 Monoposto Racing Club championship was held at Croft this weekend, and it had the potential to decide the championship. I went into the meeting 12 points adrift of Jeremy Timms, having trailed him in the championship for the entire year. Jeremy could have clinched the championship here, but fortunately the outcome was rather different, and now the championship will go down to the wire at the final meeting of the year in just over two weeks time at Silverstone on the National circuit.
The whole weekend was a chilly affair, but the rain stayed away (at least during daylight hours), and the track remained in reasonably good shape throughout. Saturday morning saw a fairly uneventful qualifying session in which Timms took a fairly easy pole position from me in 2nd, with Richard Purcell in 3rd having repaired his engine. The gap between Jeremy and me was 0.3 seconds, which isn’t a lot in Monoposto terms, but I didn’t have an answer for him. The misfire had returned, this time no longer on gear changes (well, it did once), but now on full throttle; it occurred at 6300rpm or thereabouts, and the only way to maintain competitiveness was to reduce the throttle slightly (to 90%), which allowed me to accelerate through it. How much time that was costing me isn’t known, and it may have cost me pole position, but I think overall Jeremy just out drove me.
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The Croft meeting is creeping up on us (indeed so much so that we’re leaving tomorrow, and I started writing this last weekend), and could be a decisive round of the championship. Indeed, Jeremy could clinch the championship at this meeting should he get the full 32 points and I only get two 7th places (or similar combinations – if he gets two thirds and one fastest lap to a double zero from me etc.). But this isn’t fantastically likely given the progress of each of us so far in the year.
Croft is not a circuit I know well – I was there last year, but we were trying out Silverstone Tyres for the weekend, and as a result had to make do with a couple of 3rds. However, I was buoyed by my qualifying speed on the Sunday (2nd on the grid), and this year we’ll be using Avon tyres, so should be able to take the fight to Jeremy.
MoreThe track is the most difficult I’ve yet been on – it’s quite bumpy, has some very ‘technical’ corners that demand patience and precision, and has some very quick bits that demand, for want of a better term, balls. It was, therefore, critical that we maximised our track time to learn the circuit and get the car handling nicely, as our rivals had prior experience at the circuit that would give them an initial lap time advantage. This was aided by Simon Davey working his magic and arranging a non-championship race, the practice for which was the first session of the weekend – effectively it was a test session, and our participation in the race (the last Mono session of the weekend) would depend on how we were feeling, and how track-worthy the car was, after the championship races.
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