But I can’t ignore Gary Thomas’s new sprint and hillclimb photo site. He takes some cracking pictures of the sprint scene and shows them off at his photo site yourftd.com where you can also order prints and electronic copies.

I’ll admit to some involvement though – my web design firm Interconnect IT was lightly involved. Unusually this wasn’t our more typical and more complex implementations – instead we installed suitable off the shelf open source software, created a nice logo, gave Gary some instruction, and sent him on his way. Keeps the budget simple, if you stick to things that have already been done. It’s not been without it’s problems, however, and I soon learned that a large collection of images – all of which need some server manipulation – can take up enormous server resources. It’s not Gary’s fault, this – I honestly thought it would be no problem given the usual performance of our sites. But with that and sniffpetrol.com hammering our machines I realised it was time to upgrade our server. So you should see some rip-snorting performance on this and our other websites – we now have a shiny new machine which we no longer share with other web firms. Woo!

I’m going to be cheeky and include a sample image from Gary’s site down below, just to show you the quality of his work:

It was an unusual day for me, in part, because I’d not really expected to be competing! I’d really given up on this season – with a shortage of funds and time while I continue getting my business on its feet (it’s at http://www.interconnectit.com visit it, it’s great!) I’d cut back my motorsport involvement to the very basics. However, before I’d made that decision, back in April, I’d already entered for this event.

Completely forgotten, the event drew closer and I only realised I was entered when I was volunteered for passenger rides to Juice FM prize winners! I responded that I’d be happy to help, but couldn’t as I didn’t think I was there. Reassurances that I’d entered quickly came back so, with just a week left, I quickly tried to get my car working and ready for motorsport!

The day itself was one of those where I never felt as on form as I should. A lack of circuit time certainly didn’t help, but I quickly set at 53.01 time on my first run. Problem was, I couldn’t really improve on that. David Marshall in his potent 205 GTI was all over my times and a win wasn’t assured. Gary Thomas, who I can usually rely on to push me in this class had moved to mod-prods due to running semi-slick tyres. Even he, however, failed to break his own Elise record in spite of the great tyres. I can only assume that the windy conditions didn’t favour the lightweight and relatively low powered Elise. Eventually, on the last run, I managed to pip David Marshall by 5/100ths of a second! On the final ‘fun run’ I went quicker again, experimenting with some lines and being aggressive with the kerbs, but still over a second slower than my personal record.

The picture below, incidentally, was taken by Gary. He’s now making available his images through a quick and simple online gallery application I helped him set up. Online photo galleries can be something of a nightmare, especially if you’re trying to sell the pictures – eCommerce systems don’t work well with large numbers of images, and Photo Gallery systems don’t do eCommerce very well. However, in spite of that I think we did a nice wee site, and the pictures are great – if you want photographs from sprints and hillclimbs, he’s got some great examples at yourftd.com.

And it didn’t really go well – at a trackday at Aintree the week before, a start-of-season shakedown for me and the car, I quickly realised that my car’s handling was evil. I don’t mean evil as in a little tricky at the limits, but evil as in “I think this car wants to kill me” evil.

It all started off harmlessly enough – driving there, having not really touched the car in months, I thought to myself “These Elises are skittish aren’t they?” And guessed that I just needed to ease in. However, on going out I knew I should be at least as quick as another chap in his Exige. And I wasn’t. In fact, he was gaining on me and, as we rounded Bechers, the back-end of the car let go quite dramatically. Given that my nature isn’t to spin very often, especially at this point in a corner, alarm bells started to sound.

I carried on, but as we bounced out of bumps the truth dawned on me – I had a damper problem. So I gave up before having an accident, looked under the back of the car and, sure enough, the left rear damper was dribbling oil.

So for the day I gave it up, went home, got into the tow car, and tracked that instead! And I can safely say that a Saab 9-5 Estate is a rubbish track car. Not slow though, and bowling along in near silence, with aircon and Radio 4 on is quite pleasant even if it is quite difficult to follow an Archers plotline and clip the apex at the same time.

So moving on to Anglesey, and the first sprint on the new layout… well, here we had a problem – the dampers didn’t return from Nitron until Saturday morning (but credit to them for the rapid turnaround) and I had to skip that day. However, the second day was my chance to show some mettle – albeit in an Elise only class of just four cars – including Gary Thomas.

So it’s a shame that the front left damper decided to fail.

The effect was dramatic – at first there was an obvious pattering from the front left under load, but the problem really came if you found yourself sideways – that undamped spring unsettling the car considerably and causing me an enormous tank slapper.

All I can say is that I did my best. I managed to come in second, behind Gary Thomas’s always strong pace. I was pretty much in that place all day, with Lee Cliff, a relative rookie, trailing a good few seconds behind as he continues to learn the ropes.

The circuit is a cracker – beautiful views, and now blessed with a top-class surface and layout. They’ve really come up trumps on the track and I’m looking forward to many more great events there in the future. If only more sprint circuits were like this.