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The weekend started early as there was a championship rolling road session booked at Superchips in Buckingham Friday morning. The race car and camper were all loaded on
Thursday so we could just set off early Friday without any delays. Martyn had to pick Aaron up first so he would be coming to the workshop to collect any bits that I could
not pack before meeting us at Silverstone.
We signed up to a rolling road session as the Vento was down a bit on power and we had Storm Developments remapped the ECU for us to give more power.
With the lower power we were heavier than we needed to be with no further ways of removing reasonable amounts of weight from the car. The rolling road session did not
go completely to plan, it turned out we had more power than we expected and had to bolt in a further 40Kg of ballast to compensate.
Saturday was showery so it was another of those times of trying to decide if we run wet tyres or slicks. As it turned out the rain stopped just before our
practice so we went out on slicks and after we returned to our awnings it started raining again, brilliant! This was our first time on the GP circuit so practise
was first of all about finding my way around before trying to achieve some sort of reasonable lap time. It is actually a very nice circuit with fast flowing bends
and a couple of tight ones that you need to get right as they lead onto the straights. It was actually one of my better qualifying efforts as I qualified 18th of 28 cars.
Both of our races were on the Sunday which was cloudy but dry.
Race 1 started badly as I did not get a very good start and lost several places on the start line but the Vento was going well and I started to make some of the places back.
The only tricky moment was when following Doug Ross through Becketts there was suddenly a lot of blue smoke as Doug came off the track mid corner making visibility virtually zero.
It turned out Doug’s engine had blown and it was only smoke across the circuit as he stayed on the grass. I finished the race in 13th which I felt to be a very good result for me
and the car felt strong.
In race 2 again I did not get a good start and ended back in 21st. Again I had to fight my way back through the field. At one point I was following the Caddy van through Becketts
when I realised it was getting really out of shape and was going much too fast to be able make the corner. I saw the Caddy go off to the right but as the circuit bends to the right
at the next corner it headed back straight onto the circuit. I braked a bit harder than I would normally and the Caddy came across the front of me, I accelerated hard and saw in my
mirrors the Caddy fish tailing across the circuit behind me. I fought my way back up to 16th when the fuse and relay box came away from its mountings under the dashboard and landed
on my right foot. I carried on by lifting the fuse box with my foot as I moved it between the throttle and brake. My laces became entangled and made it virtually impossible to move
my foot as the fuse box caught on the brake pedal mountings so I thought the safest thing would be to head into the pits. As it turned out it was the last lap and I ended up crossing
the finish line in the pit lane, finishing 21st. If I had realised it was the last lap I could have limped over the line with only losing two places. Never mind I had two enjoyable
races and the Vento lives to fight another day.
Martyn will be racing the Vento at Brands Hatch on the weekend 25th and 26th September. As he is faster than me he will be able to better access what effect the extra weight
we are carrying has on handling and performance.
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