A rather delayed report as a result of an “interesting” week at work.

Last weekend was the first race of the season, a Formula Jedi race at Brands Hatch. I’d booked a test session on the preceeding Friday to use as a “shakedown” session and make sure that the car was working correctly after the winter.

Unfortunately the drama started before we even managed to get to the circuit. When we were around 10 miles from the circuit, I smelled burning and decided to stop at a service station to investigate. When we got there, I discovered that I had five tonnes of motorhome, two tonnes of trailer and no brakes - the pedal went straight to the floor! Luckily, we were only doing around 15mph at the time, so we didn’t hit anything. Nevertheless, it is not an experience I would like to repeat!

There followed a long saga which I won’t bore you with involving many calls to the RAC, the eventual upshot of which was that they recovered the motorhome and we arrived at a hastily booked hotel towing the trailer behind my father’s pickup truck (thank goodness they decided not to come in Sallie’s Audi!) at around 1am.

The car has had a fair bit of work done on it over the winter in an attempt to cure some of the problems we had last year. It has new 6-pot front brakes (very smart!) and had a full chassis setup at the Jedi factory (on the assumption that I’d got something wrong which was the cause of the handling problems I had last year). It was slightly out - but not really by enough to explain the problem - so we also uprated the front springs (on the theory that if I was fast in the wet but slow in the dry and therefore probably running the car too soft).

The test day demonstrated that the car basically worked, but was suffering from clutch problems. A bit of bedding in improved things considerably, although it’s still not quite right.

The race was an event which I, and most of the grid, were particularly looking forward to as it was on the Grand Prix circuit (club racers normally only get to race on the shorter Indy circuit). It would be the first time that any of us had a chance to drive it (which made for a very well attended drivers briefing in the morning :-)

Learning the track and qualifying at the same time was fun - with me ending up 6th on the grid. The car behaved itself very well indeed, although the brakes weren’t quite what I hoped they might be. After some advice from Jedi, we tried winding the bias further toward the rear for the race.

I managed to make up one place on the grid before the race even started - Russell Small who qualified just ahead of me didn’t manage to get off the line and had to start from the back of the field. My start wasn’t great (I still haven’t got the hang of getting the car off the line with flatslide carbs!) and I dropped down to sixth. I managed to get fifth back before the end of the first lap, however, but by this time there was something of a gap to David Cameron in fourth. Over the next few laps, I did my best to hold onto his tail, but he was consistently edging away. I was determined that I wasn’t going to just trail around by myself, so decided that I was going to try to find a bit more speed somewhere. Unfortunately I tried a little too hard, and ended up in the gravel on the outside of Druids hairpin, and that was it - race over :-(

On the plus side, it did mean that I could watch the fantastic battle for the lead between Frazer and Felix - Felix pushing Frazer very (very!) close indeed.

So, not a great weekend, but not too bad either. The car is working well and should be a good platform to develop for the rest of the season.

The next race is at Castle Combe this weekend, and then it’s Silverstone GP the following weekend :-)

(Oh - the race calendar has “evolved” a few times since the calendar I sent out a while ago - the final version is here