When you com­pete in motor­s­port one of the pecu­liar things is the change in your per­cep­tion of what’s pos­sible. You do an amaz­ing run and you just think to your­self “there’s no way I could go any quicker there.” And then next time out, you go that bit quicker again. And you won­der where on earth the extra time comes from. I have some the­or­ies — but more on that fur­ther down the article.

If you’ve fol­lowed pre­vi­ous posts you’ll know that hav­ing the car in a fit state for this event was a prob­lem. The toelink had failed and gave the car hand­ling that could most char­it­ibly be described as ‘novel’. With the field at Ain­tree being full of qual­ity drivers such as Bobby Fri­ars and Gary Thomas there was no way to com­pete without a well setup car. At 4:30pm the day before, I col­lec­ted the car from Chris­topher Neil in North­wich — Paul there had done a ster­ling job in get­ting the Elisep­arts kit fit­ted in time for me. You have to give credit to any fran­chise deal­er­ship will­ing to fit a third party item to a car. Unfor­tu­nately, apart from a quick run on local roads there was no way to be sure that the kit was going to work prop­erly or the geo­metry hadn’t been messed up.

After first prac­tice at Ain­tree it was quite obvi­ous that everything was just fine. The car still handled beau­ti­fully and I was able to post a first time of 52.40 — only a third of a second slower than the record which stood until this year. I felt good, though I noticed Gary Thomas had gone frac­tion­ally faster. We’d set out our mark­ers and it was obvi­ous where the battle was going to be.

For second prac­tice it rained. I was able to go much quicker than Gary, but quite pos­sibly that’s just because I’m much more stu­pid. If it con­tin­ued to rain I might have a straight­for­ward win, but frankly I wasn’t interest in just win­ning — I wanted my old class record back. It stood at 52.07, before Gary took it with a 51.84.

First com­pet­it­ive run… and… 51.44! I cheered the car as I passed the fin­ish line — it was .63s faster than my best ever and a long way inside Gary’s best. I felt like I had the record! Which is a shame because when I came I was told Gary’s time… 51.07! How on earth.…? I was won­der­ing where this extra time was going to come from. I’d beaten my own tar­get of break­ing 51.5s but find­ing another half a second was going to be some challenge.

Second run. I’ll men­tion now that Gary went a little slower. But me… I had to nail it. The first corner was slightly wild, but still quick. The rest were great, everything com­ing together. As you come towards the fin­ish line at ain­tree you can see the clock tick­ing up for what seems an age. 49… 50… and as I crossed the line it flicked over to 51… point 14. Damn!

Third and last com­pet­it­ive run. I had to really be per­fect this time. And I was — the start was great, the first corner utterly per­fect, the second just right… and then I decided to go asleep for a second. Really — I was so angry with myself. As I approached Bech­ers I braked just a tad too early. It’s not a huge prob­lem, but per­haps worth 1/10^th of a second. But what really messed me up was that as I turned in I real­ised I’d not shif­ted down for the corner. Now, in a race, if you’re fol­lowed by someone slower they still won’t pass you if you make a mis­take like this. And if you’re chas­ing someone slower… well, you’ll make up the lost time on the next lap. But in a sprint at a simple (ish) and fast cir­cuit like Ain­tree you have no chance of recov­ery. So what did I do? Well of course I made things even worse by chan­ging down to third, mid-corner.… cor­rec­ted the res­ult­ant slide, and headed for the fin­ish line.

Stu­pid stu­pid stu­pid. Now, let’s go back to my first para­graph — when I set the 51.44 time it felt rapid. Really good and it was hard to see how I could go faster. And now, in spite of ram­pa­ging stu­pid­ity and care­less driv­ing I’d man­aged a 51.40. Huh?!

But it was game over. Gary drove a stonker on the next lap and is now the first to take a road-going pro­duc­tion car around the sprint cir­cuit in less than 51s, with a 50.97s time. Damn — he was the first to crack 52s as well! We’d pushed each other so hard that we’d smashed up all the old records. Gary has a dis­tinct power advant­age over me, but it’s pos­sible for me to drive bet­ter still. I believe I’ve man­aged to develop the car to a point where its hand­ling is pretty much per­fectly bal­anced and benign. I could add more power — the under­bon­net engin­eer­ing is done now to handle over 200bhp and I guess that would bring me in line with Bobby and Gary’s cars.

The­or­ies on speed

At some point I’ll write up an art­icle on what I think it takes to get quick on the race cir­cuit. But for the time being I’ll expound one little the­ory I’ve been build­ing up.

I reckon there are three phases that you go through in becom­ing a decent driver, maybe more. I can only really speak from my own experiences.

But it’s kinda hard to explain. You get through these three step changes — from first fum­blings in a kart you real­ise that win­ning isn’t always feas­ible — so you learn to max­im­ise what you have. Then you dis­cover that a ‘moment’ won’t neces­sar­ily turn nasty if you keep cool. So then you go a bit quicker again because you’re not scared of the car. Then sud­denly some­thing else hap­pens — a smooth­ness devel­ops, along with cour­age over recov­er­ing the car, and so on. And sud­denly you’re get­ting there. I guess there’s more still to come, but I’ve no idea where it comes from. If it hap­pens to me… I’ll let you know!

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