Two videos from Silverstone (both races):
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The final round of the year was held at a chilly Silverstone, utilising the National circuit configuration. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was thinking ahead to round 1 at Brands Hatch…
Going into the event I had the luxury of an 8 point lead in the standings, which meant I could happily accept two 2nd place finishes as long as I got the fastest lap for one race. But the trouble with motorsport is that it’s difficult to go slower than you can (mistake creep in as you deviate from your usual rhythm), and virtually impossible to go faster than you are able to. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to keep up and get fastest lap. Maybe Richard Purcell would be quicker. Maybe something would break on the car. Maybe Jeremy would crash. All I could do, in my role as driver, was do my best…
Saturday was cold and wet to begin with. The smaller engined Mono cars (I playfully refer to them as the MiniMonos) were out first, and the tyre choice was divided between wets and slicks. Fortunately, by the time we were due out the track was mostly dry, and we went out with dry-weather slick tyres.
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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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We’re well into the 2010 season now, and the general trends are already apparent. In our case, it’s been that we have had a quick car, but one with too many reliability problems, and hence we’ve been lacking in championship points despite a fairly large proportion of fastest laps and pole positions so far.
Most of our reliability problems have been due to bad luck rather than poor preparation, and we arrived at Oulton Park hoping our luck would change a bit. At most races we’ve had one disaster, so it was slightly pleasing when that occurred before we’d even got out of Norfolk – I realised I’d forgotten the laptop, which is important for checking the datalogging as well as attempting to improve the poor mapping in the ECU. Emma and I went back for it, whilst Andrew and Martin continued in the truck to the track. As disasters go, it wasn’t a big one, but we hoped that it would count in the eyes of Lady Luck!
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