Jul
11
Lisa Selby BWRDC Blog – Woes in Wales!
Round 4 of the CSCC Tin Tops series was up in North Wales at the Anglesey Circuit / Trac Mon.
We’d made a few tweaks to the car since Spa and were hoping it would handle a bit better around corners, knowing this was something we had to improve on. Our times were fairly quick in qually; we qualified 13th overall and 2nd in class, but had loads of understeer. Speaking to others, they also had understeer, so we thought nothing more of it.
After changing front tyres and a few other checks we decided to assess the tracking about 30 mins before the race, just in case the mods had affected it. We had 2.5 deg toe-in – that’ll explain the understeer! We managed to get it down to 1 deg before running out of time and being called up for assembly, so that’s what we had to race with.
I had a mediocre start and managed to get right behind Mike Nash in his Peugeot 106, another Class C competitor, within a lap or two, while Gareth Newton in his Mitsubishi Mirage (another class C car) was right behind me. I had a great race with them both and it was nice to have all 3 class C cars battling for the same piece of track.
I came in for the pit stop 2nd in Class and handed over to Toby. The change went well but then the car wouldn’t start. Anglesey’s pit lane is on a hill, so trying to push the Puma uphill after 20 mins racing wasn’t easy! Luckily we had some people come to help us (thank you) and though we lost about 20 seconds we eventually got it started.
Toby was on track for about 2 corners when the safety car was deployed. This ruined our race completely as Toby was one of the first behind the safety car and the pack bunched up and Mike and Gareth were effectively on the next lap behind us. Toby was P3 in class and with 80 seconds to catch up, it was effectively game over. We finished 3rd in Class and 15th Overall.
Taking positives from the day, I was quicker than Toby again in the race and I also had fastest lap for Class C, so not a total disaster, but very disappointing that Toby didn’t get to race with Mike and Gareth for the class awards.
The next round is at Castle Combe, our home circuit, so we are hoping to put in a good performance there. The starter motor has been changed the tracking set and the car checked over, so fingers crossed!
Yours in Motorsport,
Lisa
Photo by David Stallard – for more info see www.