A quick summary for those who don’t want to read to the end: We seem to be making progress with getting the car working - which culminated on Sunday with me setting the Monoposto lap record for the Silverstone GP circuit :-)

Apologies for the once again delayed report. Small details like resigning from my job have kinda distracted me :-)

So, the weekend before last we were at Castle Combe for a Formula Jedi race, and then last weekend we were at Silverstone for a Monoposto race on the GP circuit.

The main feature of the Castle Combe event was brake problems. The brakes were completely unpredictable - sometimes the car would stand on its nose, and on other occasions the pedal would go long. And Castle Combe is not a circuit where you want to have a lack of confidence in the brakes (it’s very fast, and there’s very little runoff)! In retrospect, this problem might well be the reason why I ended up in the kitty litter at Brands in the previous event :-(

The net result was that I qualified 8th and finished 5th. Not a bad result (and I did at least finish!) but I inherited the positions I gained as a result of people dropping out for various reasons and wasn’t able to drive the car as I would have liked.

It turns out that I’m not the only person who’s been having these kinds of problems with the new 6-pot front brakes. John Corbyn of Jedi has been trying to diagnose the cause, and came up with a theory. The 6-pot callipers need more brake fluid movement to work properly than the 2-pot callipers on the rear. This meant that the front and rear brakes were acting in very different ways (the rears were engaging before the fronts even started working).

So before Silverstone, I fitted a larger bore master cylinder for the front brakes. It was a bit of a “punt” as we wouldn’t have time to test them before qualifying, but worth a go.

I’d been looking forward to the Silverstone event ever since I heard about it. It’s extremely rare for club racers to get a chance to race on the full GP circuit (exactly the same circuit as is used for the British GP).

Qualifying was always going to be interesting, given that I would be learning the circuit and testing the brakes at the same time! As it happened though, it was much more difficult than I expected. Firstly, the traffic was awful - we were sharing the grid with much slower Mono1600 and Mono1800 cars, and it wasn’t at all unusual to come across three cars across the track, all trying to overtake each other, and find nowhere to go. And then with just a few laps gone, I spotted clouds of smoke pouring out of my car in my mirrors, so pulled into the pits :-(

It turned out that the oil filler cap had vibrated loose, spraying oil all over the rear of the car and the exhaust (hence the smoke!). Luckily I’d spotted the problem before the engine spat all of its oil out, so no permanent damage done (although there was lots of mess to clear up!).

I’d managed to get one half-decent lap in before pulling into the pits, so ended up 9th on the grid (not as bad as it might have been!).

We were scheduled to be the 2nd to last race of the day. The race was supposed to have been 15 minutes (which is only 8 laps because the circuit is so long!), but as the day went on it became increasingly clear that we were running out of time. Sure enough, while we were sitting in the holding area, we were told that the race had been reduced to 10 minutes :-(

In the race, I got my trademark terrible start (I just can’t train myself to be as brutal with the clutch as you need to be with flatslides), but quickly started making up places. At the end of the first lap, I was lying 5th, a few seconds behind the lead group of 4 cars. Over the next couple of laps, I gradually gained on them, but then all of a sudden the chequered flag was waving. Three laps and the race was over :-( There were some very unhappy people after the race - it’s a lot of money and time for 3 laps!

On the plus side, the brakes were much better (still not perfect - they’re suffering from pad knock back, the pedal goes long if I run over the kerbs) and the handling was much better than last year - I was able to “play” with the attitude of the car with much more confidence in how it would behave.

And then when I got the results sheet, I had a very nice surprise. I’d set the fastest lap of the race, and as it was the first time that Mono had run at the GP circuit, that meant that I was the lap record holder :-) Which is a nice consolation!

The next race is a Formula Jedi race at Pembrey on the 14th and 15th of May.