Its seemed like a lifetime but finally after 5 months of no drifting, round 1 of the British Drift Championship finally arrived. Lydden Hill Circuit was my destination for some long awaited seat time.
Arriving at the track on Friday morning, for once it was a fairly leisurely start for me. The format to the championship had been changed to run all the Pro-Am class on the Friday and all the Pro class on Saturday. The Pro class would also have a short practise session Friday afternoon just to give the cars a quick shake down but nothing more.
The morning was spent setting up the pit area with the rest of my team and generally checking over our cars, making any last minute adjustments and waiting eagerly for my delivery of Landsail tyres to arrive at the track.
On Saturday morning after arriving at the track it was time for the drivers briefing. The judges decided that they wanted to see all the drivers taking a different and more challenging line round the track to usual. As I hadn’t yet had a chance of any practise using Landsail tyres, I knew qualifying was not going to be an easy task but I am always up for a challenge.
It took a good few laps to get used to the way the Landsail tyres handle and working out what tyre pressures would be best to run them at to get the level of grip I would need for the track. Using Landsail on both the front and the rear I knew I would have to take the first few laps pretty steady until I worked them out. I had no reason to worry at all as right from the start I could feel the grip level I had was good even though the tyres were cold so knew they could only get better as they heated up.
Going in to qualifying the pressure was on as another change in the format for this years championship meant all drivers would only have 2 qualifying runs instead of the usual 3. That alone meant I had no margin for errors. Adding to that, I was still getting used to the new tyres so I can honestly say I knew it was going to be tough to qualify.
My first qualifying run was what you’d call a ‘safe run’ not pushing the car too hard and making sure I stayed to the line round the track the judges wanted to see. My second qualifying run I decided to push harder and faster which resulted in me getting one of the highest speeds of the day through the second clipping zone of the track. The consistency in the tyres performance level gave me the confidence I needed to keep pushing.
The results were in. I qualified 10th out of 42 drivers. All things considered, I was more than happy with the result. After a short break for tyre changing and refuelling it was time for the twining battles. My battle was drawn against Gaz Taylor in his Nissan S14a. Our cars couldn’t be more different with his being a lot lighter and nimbler than my Soarer.
As I was the higher qualifier out of Taylor and myself, I was to be the lead car on the first run of the battle. The first run of the battle seemed fairly evenly matched on both sides but with being the lead car its hard to judge exactly.
With the roles reversed it was now Taylor as the lead car. The battled started off with good pace but unfortunately after the hairpin I couldn’t see through Taylors smoke trails causing me to make a correction which cost me the battle.
Round 1 has been a massive learning curve for me using the new Landsail tyres for the first time, but I can honestly say they didn’t falter at all with consistently good performance levels. I am now looking forward to getting some more practice in before round 2 when I will be heading back to my favourite track, Knockhill, Scotland.
I would like to thank Landsail tyres, GBH Motorsport and Wolfbitz for all coming onboard for the 2015 drift season. I would also like to thank Huxley Motorsport and EverythingDrift.com for their continued support this year.