This years championship starts slightly earlier than it ever has done before which means a little bit less time over the winter to get the cars ready for the years competitions. For me, because the car finished last year reliable there wasn’t too much that needed doing to get ready for this year which was a bonus as my partner and I had a baby late last year which took up most of our time.
Anyway, round 1 was at Rockingham Motor Speedway which was just a short journey down the road for me, this is the first time the BDC has been to Rockingham for a round and the track would be our first custom built track of the year. With an hours practice on the Saturday I used this session to reacquaint myself with the car as I hadn’t driven it for nearly 6 months.
After a couple of runs I was pretty comfortable with the car and started dialling in on the line the judges wanted to see us run, this was made up of 9 clipping points 4 of which run up against a concrete wall. At the end of the session we gave to car a quick check over and prep for more of the same on Sunday.
Sunday, we have 2 hours of practice in the morning to fine tune the car setup, get the qualifying line right and practice some twinning with the other drivers. There was no big dramas in practice for me apart from a wall rub until my very last run when halfway round the first turn the car suddenly lost power. My initial thought was low fuel but when we checked this back in the pits we found there to be plenty left in the tank so we checked fuel supply.
After a bit of investigating we found one of the fuel pumps had failed meaning there wasn’t enough fuel pressure supplying the engine. Not having a spare pump myself we managed to source one from another driver, we fitted the pump and this rectified the issue just in time for qualifying. Time for my first qualifying run, I set off from the start line and initiated into the first turn just like I had been during practice but for some reason the car reacted differently and I ended up spinning out.
Now with just one more run the pressure was on to get a score on the board, this time I went for a less aggressive safer entry. Up to clipping point 6 it was the best run I’d done all weekend but then I got massive vibration through the steering, I tried to carry on to the finish line but wasn’t able to.
This meant with no scores during qualifying it was the end of the competition for me. The issue was a front tyre de-beading during the run and the only explanation for this I can think of is that the tyre picked up a puncture and lost pressure result in the de-beading. It was really gutting to end the competition like this but we’ll be back for round 2 at Teesside.
I would like to thank all my sponsors for their support and help, GBH Motorsport, Landsail Tyres, 3sixtywraps, Pipercross, Goodridge, Huxley Motorsport, EverythingDrift, StrongflexUK,