Yesterday was the first race of the season, a Monoposto round at Silverstone. This would be the first time that the car had turned a wheel “in anger” after all of the work over the winter.

The start of the day was pretty hectic. Jedi had forgotten to send exhaust mounts to replace the ones which had failed during the test at Mallory. We therefore organised for a race supplies company based at Silverstone to leave an envelope with some in it for me at the gate. Amazingly, this worked, so the first job was to fit these before scruitineering. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the paddock organisation was the normal Peterborough Motor Club shambles, resulting in us having to move the car and trailer after having unpacked everything. Hey ho.

The weather forecast was for rain all day, and sure enough it started raining just before the first practice session of the day. By the time we were due out, the rain had stopped, but the track was still wet enough that rain tyres were clearly the right choice. A number of people managed to throw their cars at the scenery in the conditions, resulting in the session being red flagged after a couple of laps and many yellow flags throughout the rest of the session. It was very difficult to find a clear lap, but other people obviously found it even harder than I did, and I ended up qualifying 2nd (although more than a second slower than John Lord’s pole time).

By the time the race was due to start, the track was completely dry, and although the sky looked threatening and there were the odd spots of rain, slicks were order of the day. The arrangement of the grid was slightly odd - for some reason they decided to put pole position on the left hand side of the track when the first corner, Copse, is a right-hander. I wasn’t complaining, as this definitely worked to my advantage.

I was a little apprehensive about the start, as this would be the first time I’d done a racing start with the new engine, and I wasn’t entirely sure of the best technique to use. As it happened, I got a pretty good start - not great, but good enough to mean that I was in the lead into Copse, although I had both John Lord and Andrew Cowell (who had qualified in 4th and therefore right behind me on the grid) very close in my mirrors. On the run down to Maggots, Richard Cottrell appeared from nowhere and shot past the whole lot of us. Pretty impressive given that he’d qualified in 7th!

I was still in 2nd at the end of the lap, but was having some problems keeping John Lord behind me. The engine was bogging down in the middle of corners - at first, I berated myself for being in the wrong gear, but it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the problem. The engine was fantastic above 10,000RPM, but there was nothing at all below that. Unfortunately, the gearing just isn’t close enough to be able to keep the engine revving that high :-(

I managed to hold 2nd for a short while, but it couldn’t last and both John Lord and Peter Whitmore both got past me on lap 3. That was it until the flag, and I finished in 4th.

We’re not sure what the problem with the engine is. The fact that it’s fine at high revs is encouraging, as it probably means that whatever the problem is isn’t too serious. The most likely culprit is carburetion. It will be a little disappointing if this is the problem, given that the car was on a rolling road, supposedly to get the carbs set up correctly, less than 2 weeks ago! I will be calling the rolling road to discuss first thing on Monday :-)

Next race (and the first Formula Jedi round) is a double-header at Croft on the 17/18th. As ever, let me know if you don’t want to receive my ramblings and I’ll remove you from the list…