What a weekend. Fun was had by all, once we remembered to breath. Saturday was hell as we did not have rain tires. We didn’t prep for the rain, we didn’t expect Infineon to be the equivilent of ice, nor did we even bother to buy new tires with proper grip. Our times ranges from 2:35 to 3:01 depending on how many times we spun during a single lap. I got a mention on Gary Faules blog and a very crappy picture taken of me.

We stood in the rain from 7am until about 6pm. It was a long cold day.We had some confusion on some of the rules which got sorted out. On Sunday we did much better, crawling out of last place to about 4th when the exhaust broke off. Now this would not have been a problem aside from the highly flammable nature of the Lotus Elise. My co-driver’s elise bubbled the paint from one lap at Buttonwillow with a detached exhaust and another friend’s exige burnt down in less than two minutes from tar catching up under the diffuser. It wasn’t worth the risk for no prize money and our first day out. We lost about 40 minutes or more of racing and ultimately fell 20 laps behind while we repaired the exhaust. A very slow last 5 minutes worth of lapping gave us 6th which we’re fine with because as has always been our motto “we’re here to finish” or is it “everything is better with bacon”?

We came away with a mechanically sound vehicle and some contact with another car that wasn’t felt and didn’t even come through the wax on our paint. Well as Gary said, “rookies were doing what rookies do which is primarily everything except what they are supposed to be doing”. We are definitely not used to driving in traffic. Racing against the clock with 30 seconds on you and only one car (two if we’re having a good day!) to pass is a lot different than 40+ cars of different speeds on the track at once.We’re in E0 via T2 which I think has us out of our league with the completely stock set up.

Again this comes down to rule confusion which we need to get sorted out. We’re in the lowest speed class, I believe, and had we had proper tires we’d have done better. Our best lap time on Sunday was 2:06 which is a marked improvement over Saturday but there was still a considerable lack of grip. We also had an 8 minute pit stop during our 5 gallon refueling because our can wasn’t properly vented. It was painful. 5 gallons is heavy and holding it up for 8 minutes almost killed me!

From what I’ve heard some other cars have me spinning on video. Hopefully I can hook up with them and get a copy. I would love to post it. I went off during warm up because I was just sliding sideways and then got stuck in the wet grass for the rest of warm up. I got one lap in. It was great. All things aside, I had a great time. The other drivers were really nice and we’ll be back out soon!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 12:07 am and is filed under Rachel Larratt, Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.