50 laps of Sunset Infield Reverse.

Car. Make go faster.

This weeks car choice for me was the Porsche Boxster, in this championship you only run a car once before it's discarded, it's a nice rule and brings some variety to the field, thanks to my manflu this week I haven't really spent as much time as I would of liked getting the car setup for the race. I stumbled onto the Porsche after trying about ten other cars. Right from the off, it felt quick and after some minor tweaks, seemed to be quite stable for lobbing around the track. So once again I found myself settling down in front of the 360 at 3am to race a field of americans and canadians.

Thanks to a random grid order, I started 6th out of the 7 cars and fluffed the start, dropping back quite far from the others as they roared off towards turn one. Alas there was no first corner pile up this week so I settled down and slowly managed to find my pace and creep up towards the pack. By lap 4 I was all over 6th place and happily got past him with no trouble. Fifth place was a slightly trickier affair as the chap swerved across my path and chopped me off, I composed myself again and managed to get the jump coming up to a nice slow corner. By now I was starting to grow a little in confidence and my lap times were dropping down as the field started to spread out. First and second were miles ahead and I had pretty much accepted that fourth was about the best I could do.

That was until the 4th placed car clipped a wall and I sailed right past the crash. It was lap 14 and over the next 4 laps I managed to bang some very quick laps in, slowly reeling the 3rd placed car. We pitted on the same lap and after the pitstop I was fairly close behind him. Luckily he damaged his car as well and I took up the postion. Feeling quite chuffed I set about trying to catch second place who was around 15 seconds in front of me, based on the fact that chatter between the drivers in front revealed I was banging in laptimes around half a second quicker than the second place driver. It was a slim chance but with around 30 laps to go, I might get lucky. Or he might stack it.

Lap 35 and the second place pitted, I had closed to around 4.5 seconds behind and was starting to think I could do it, I didn't pit that lap as my tyres were quite good (I'm running the hardest race tyre and the others have so far always chosen the softest, and I've kept that bit quiet from them) I had a nice clear track and set my fastest lap. By the end of that lap I was showing as 27 seconds in front of 3rd place and was about to pit when I was collected up passing a back runner, it was a pure accident, but it didn't stop me from flicking the headset off and swearing my arse off, before calmly switching it back on to console the apologetic driver.

Nice bridge.

I pitted the ruined car and saw that Mr 3rd place had whipped past by the time I exited, I was still over 2000 yrds in front of 4th and had to settle with keeping him behind me and finishing in 3rd.

After fluking it in the opening race, I had to accept this was karma paying me back. Shame though, I was really doing well.

I'm now promoted up into Div 2 for next week, along with tonights winner.

Go Team Scrote!

Next week is 100 laps of Maple Valley Short.

Happily, I'm taking Sue away for her birthday so I'll be missing this, I fucking hate that track and 100 laps would be utter torture! We are allowed to miss a race in the series and the timing is bang on for me.

April 2008

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