BIRMINGHAM
21/04/07

Due to damage at BV and costs we decided to miss the previous weeks NIR session in favour of doing both meetings at Brum and Hedno. Neil Fitton very kindly lent me his 7.5 ton box van so I could take the car down to the meetings and keep it under cover for the over night stay, which saved us the trek of coming home between meetings.

Trish, Kirsten and I set off from the garage in good time and got to Birmingham in time for the 2pm practice, we unloaded the car and as it was quiet I decided to take the car for scrutineering straight away. Tony, the scrutineer, pointed out that I had forgotten to refit my roll cage foam and advised I sort this before going out for practice. Managed to borrow some foam of FWJ, made a call back to the garage to ask Derek to bring mine later and off I went for some practice laps. As I went out I took the first couple of laps steady, trying to warm things up a bit, got myself into a clear bit of track and slowly picked up the pace. Once I had done 5 or so laps I decided to push a bit harder only for the inside rear ½ shaft to break bringing my session to an end.

Once team 218 arrived with the rest of my spares we replaced the shaft and went out again. The car was pushing on really badly and was a pig to get round the corners so a bit of head scratching and adjustment was the order of the day. I had set the car up basically as I had raced it at Skeg 2 weeks previous but something was wrong somewhere. Al Bateman and Wayne Helliwell joined the debate and adjustments were made to both the front and rear suspension plus we moved the body over slightly to the right to take some weight off the inside rear wheel which seemed to be doing 90% of the work (hence broken shaft?). A further run out in main practice confirmed we were going in the right direction so we tweaked with it a bit more before I took it out for heat 1.

As there were 54 cars present the meeting format was to be 2 heats, cons, final, GN which made for very busy heats. I lined up at the front of the grid for the first time in my career along side Stuart Smith (397) with Liam Brown (90) directly behind me and we were soon into the race. The car was still pushing on especially during the first couple of laps but I managed to keep my nose clean and finished a very hectic race! After further adjustments I was soon out again in the consolation, the car seemed to be going much better thanks to yet more input for Al and Wayne but unfortunately I was suffering from lack of brakes from the front end. Every time I went into the bends I would get showered with sparks off the OSF and had great difficulty slowing the car enough to make the turns. I carried on however, finished the race and was basically pleased that we were making progress with the car. Back in the pits the brake problem was found to be a sheared OSF hub and as I’d decided to race on we’d also managed to destroy the wheel bearing and the OSF disc to boot! Managed to borrow a hub assembly off 218 and after watching the super fast final got out in the GN for another twirl. I again managed a finish but with so many cars on track I was still in search of my elusive 1st point!!
 

After we had loaded up Derek, Al, Tony, Brian and I had a chat over a few beers and decided that before I raced at Hednesford the following day we would change another couple of things on the car to try and get rid of the push I was experiencing.