After the track day last week I was feeling fairly confident. I had the confidence to push the car and with sealant holding the engine together, it was running well. I arrived on the Saturday evening as I had bought a Janspeed exhaust off Jon Winter, and also some graphics for the car and van. They’d now both carry the Vader Trophy Racing logo, and like a kid, I was quite excited.

After lots of beer the night before I woke up to a sunny morning, and then Ian arrived who couldn’t come last night as he had a lot of work to do so drove down in the morning. After some initial preparation the car was ready to go on circuit. The first thing I noticed, while struggling with several large helpings of opposite lock was the car was not handling anything like it did the previous week. It was far too oversteery. The qualifying result was OK starting in the middle of the pack, but looking at the tyre temperatures we could see the pressures needed to come down.

Lining up on the grid for race 1, although I knew how to drive and drive in traffic now, I was still very nervous, but at least I knew what was going to happen next. Or as well as you can plan what is going to happen with 40 MR2s all charging towards turn 1. I got decent start on the outside and started moving forwards, but some panel bashing to my right meant I had to steer left in turn 1, which is a right hander. Oh dear. The car seemed to handle better on the grass than the tarmac (which is worrying) but I kept it out of the gravel and rejoined for what would be a fairly uneventful race.

For race 2 we had dropped the tyre pressures even further as they were still too high. This actually helped the handling for the first half of the race before it started to go off again. The race itself was actually good fun. I got hung out to dry on the marbles in turn 1, but the rest of the race was spent battling with a group of cars, albeit at the back of the grid, but that doesn’t really matter if you’re having fun. One thing I did notice though was the car seemed to lack power which I hoped was down to the current exhaust which I knew was poor (hence buying the Janspeed). A positive though came in post race scrutineering when the car was weighed. With very low fuel it was only 5 Kg over the weight limit. I’d best not loose any weight then, but looking at my waistline I can’t see that being possible.

Conclusions from the weekend then: use lower tyre pressures, and having a passenger in the car makes it understeer a lot more. Best note that one for the future!