If you’re in Bri­tain you’ll already be aware that for the past few weeks we’ve been get­ting rain of near bib­lical pro­por­tions, with floods caus­ing a lot of dam­age in the Mid­lands, and just a lot of heavy rain in the rest of the country.

Ain­tree wasn’t much dif­fer­ent, though not quite so bad as last Septem­ber where going out on my worn out tyres I felt as if I was power­boat racing. The rain came, and stayed on all day with some strong tor­rents. Ulti­mately my car span, but I can’t take too much of the blame… more later.…

I’ve always loved the Ain­tree sprint. On the sur­face of it, it shouldn’t be a great event. The cir­cuit is rel­at­ively simple, albeit sur­pris­ingly tech­nical, and the weather can some­times be dread­ful, but I still love it. So in this sea­son where I’ve really cut back on the events I’m doing, I’ve made sure I get in the odd event here. And I need it, on days I do a sprint or a track­day, that’s all I think about. Although some may think motor­s­port is stress­ful, to me I love the fact that for one whole day I’m not really stress­ing about busi­ness — I’m forever read­ing books, net­work­ing with people, keep­ing an eye on our serv­ers to make sure they’re behav­ing, try­ing out new soft­ware, think­ing about how to build new leads. A lot is done in the office of course, but as any­one who’s star­ted a busi­ness will know, you don’t get much relax­a­tion in the early days.

Back to the event… well, being a wet day, no records were going to be broken. The car was, how­ever, in good form with the rebuilt dampers freshly fit­ted. Of course, I hadn’t had a chance to set them up right. And I wasn’t going to fiddle with the set­tings at Ain­tree either — I ain’t grov­el­ling in the rain!

For the prac­tice runs I was on a con­ser­vat­ive 60.62 and 57.78, get­ting me second and first fast­est times in the class. David Sykes, a new­bie at Ain­tree, show­ing that he gets into the groove incred­ibly quickly with 60.35 and 58.03 times. The other close com­pet­itor here, Rus­sell Thorpe who beat me here in the rain back in Septem­ber set 61.12 and 57.93 times. I knew it’d be close between the three of us.

I knew my first com­pet­it­ive run would be crit­ical — with the rain poten­tially get­ting harder, the chance of improv­ing wasn’t high. So I went out with my teeth grit­ted (you can buy suit­able grit from all reput­able sports shops, in case you wondered) and did everything almost per­fectly. The start, the three corners. In fact, everything was going just so until about 100yds from the fin­ish line I decided a change from fourth to fifth would help as the engine was run­ning out of puff. So it’s a shame I man­age to select third.…

It’s at this point I’d like to thank the people who used to work at Rover, to thank David Andrews who built my head, and all other people who’ve bolted my engine together in the past. Because in spite of being buzzed, moment­ar­ily, to over 9000rpm, it sur­vived! I did listen care­fully for new rattles but no, everything was great.

That spoiled my run, rather — I pottered over the line about ten miles an hour slower than I should have and set a 56.81… Rus­sell, a car behind me, set a 56.73, and David Sykes was a second behind at 57.94.

The next two runs were basic­ally the same, but without the mis­takes. Myself find­ing 56.18 and 55.92, Rus­sell a con­sist­ent pair of 56.62 and 56.61 and David Sykes fail­ing to respond until his final time of 57.30 — damn good for someone new to Ain­tree and in the rain. But then we sus­pect he may not have seen just how solid those Grand National fences are. I was happy and relieved to get the class win — like all wet events, the Elise always makes you work hard for a win. Which Rus­sell proved when I let him bor­row the Elise for the ‘fun’ run that Liv­er­pool Motor Club often man­age to fit in at the end of the day. And I got to go and have a go in his Renault 5GT Turbo — and con­firm that it has a hand­ling prob­lem, per­haps due to an over-aggressive dif­fer­en­tial, which makes his times at the moment all the more impressive.

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