Donington 27 July 2008

A new member of the team for this weekend is Matt as our Technical Advisor.  His previous experience includes working with the championship winning team of Nic Grindrod (pickup truck #22).

Arrived at the track on Saturday night as all the pickup truck action on track was timetabled for Sunday only.  This means practice and both races squeezed into just the one day.  Decided to do some setup work in preparation for race day and with a few minor mistakes on my part, took a while to complete.  Learnt things the hard way which should help me remember for next time.

Sunday morning came with a few wake-up calls from the airplanes from the Nottingham East Midlands Airport.  They woke me up before my alarm and when I finally got up, me and Chris Stubbs got the truck ready for morning practice.

Richard done 2 flying laps before he suddenly stopped on-track for no reason.  Thoughts of Mondello came to my mind but thankfully it wasn’t.  End of practice and he was classified as 14th fastest out of 19 runners.  Richard got back and he said that there is no throttle so something has broken.  Got the truck in the garage and found that a small bolt in the throttle linkage was snapped off.  It was replaced as well as some extra setup work on the rear of the pickup truck as Richard was saying he had no grip on Coppice corner.  Besides that, the truck was well balanced and we were all looking forward to a good race result.

Race 1 and Richard was starting in 6th place.  He completed 2 flying laps before coming into the pits with a problem again.  This time it was clutch problem so the pickup truck was hastily pushed into the garage and work began to fix the problem.  All completed with an hour to spare thanks to everyone including Richard.  We all had a little break before getting hyped up for Race 2 as there is a good setup but no final result to prove it.

Race 2 was delayed as two BTRA Trucks ended on one another during their race and so everyone in the pickup series was waiting for the marshals to clean up the track.  They took longer than expected and so the remainder of the races on the track, which included us, was reduced by two laps.  Richard was starting second from last and behind us was championship leader Gavin Seager (#54).  We finally got underway and as the green flags came out for the start of Race 2, not a minute later there was yellow flags as three pickup trucks got involved in a incidence on the first corner.  It was Julian Arnold (#3), Michael Smith (#93) and Anthony Hawkins (#98) who all got off on the first corner.  Richard was going good and was as high 12th place until the last lap where he suffered a puncture.  He crossed the line 14th place with the front left tyre going flat.

Overall the weekend was good besides the results.  A top-10 finish is potentially possible in every race if there is a bit of luck with reliability.  Thanks to Matt for his advice and Michael Smith’s team for helping me all the time.

Bring on Thruxton!

Yung

Mechanic