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MSA British
Hill Climb Championship |
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The weather forecast was a bit iffy, especially for Saturday, but in the end there was no significant rainfall either day. There was plenty of sun, quite a lot of cloud, and loads of blustery wind. This made a change from the usual gales of racing driver bluster. We’d noticed during practice that the tyre warming area was producing a lot of squeal and not a lot of smoke. So it was decided to try both tyre warming and starts off the existing rubber. We left it until Martin’s last practice run for the experiment, just to be sneaky. I think it worked. My starts went from uncompetitive to competitive. It was much easier to make the most of the available surface than to learn to drive better. I made my first significant driving error of the weekend during first qualifying, not getting enough downshifts completed before the top of Karousel, and then compounding matters by upshifting as normal and then having to put it back into second to get any go at all up Deer’s Leap. The resulting time was 27.83. Good enough for 11th. Trevor Willis qualified 12th but a significant time behind. I think his car is beginning to work and could really use some more power. Anyway as usual I got to go first in the runoff.
So a maximum of two more goes at the elusive 26. All weekend I’d been trying to work out how to get around the top of Karousel and up to Ashes. It’s a scrabble and it’s easy to get out of shape under power. It was also clearly my weak sector. I had the fourth best split of the weekend to the top of Karousel, but only the 12th best K Sector, between the entrance to Karousel and the exit of Ashes. It’s all about tickle the throttle in first hook second and boot it only quite hard. I’m much better at ‘floor it’ so I find this part of the track very challenging. Second qualifying showed a significant improvement in this area and the time on the clock at the top was 26.90. Mission accomplished. And an improvement from 11th to 3rd on the qualifying front. Now it didn’t really matter what happened in the runoff. Qualifying third moved me up from running first to running second. This meant I got to drive up and straight back without turning the engine off. This can be dangerous if the time is good since the adrenaline has kicked in and the return trip can be rather faster than sensible. Luckily this time there were plenty of marshals to wave at which kept things calm. I was quite excited about a further improvement to 26.71s, Roger had been holding a finger up at the top, which I’ve worked out was to show I’d been 0.01s quicker. Noise really. Chris raised his game again to record the only other 26 of the runoff albeit slightly slower than Roger or me. So from my point of view a wholly good weekend. Three personal bests on the trot. Two thirds. Opening a significant gap in the championship. The weather was good, the company was good, the organisation was excellent. It was all over by four thirty. Wife and daughter seemed to have had a reasonable time. One of the best meetings of the year, regardless of the results. Elsewhere, Martin and Scott shared the wins. Scott recorded the second fastest ever time and narrowly missed the record. Both dipped into the 25s. Everybody else looked slow. If this carries on next year I’m not sure I’ll be able to concentrate on driving. It’s a long time since we’ve had two committed drivers in equivalent machinery pushing as hard as possible. Now I’m going to try some journo-banalese for a paragraph… In the other classes there were records in both up to 2 litre and unlimited Sports Libre, Matthew Harrison narrowly missing a runoff qualification. Local man Chris Cannell also went below the existing unlimited Sports Libre record. The large Guernsey contingent showed well. EuroSport’s Toby Moody backed Bill Chaplin up in the works Force with a one-two at a very respectable pace. Steve Owen ran Dave Kimberly very close in the 1100-1600 racing cars, with Chris Pickering compensating for standard Hayabusa power with pure commitment coming in third. Sandra Tomlin reset her Lady’s Record on the first timed run and then, while trying to better it again, went straight on at Karousel causing minor damage that unfortunately ruled son Oliver out for the afternoon.
Mike Dean did serious damage to Simon Durling’s 4th place at Shelsley, at Gurston he didn’t continue the progress but he did himself no real harm. This contest is looking good. Roger Moran outscored Simon and Mike, solidifying his third in the Championship. I opened a gap on Chris, Deryk Young eased past Tom New. Basil Pitt did enough that good points at Prescott would make him a player for the top 10 but not quite enough to make it easy. Trevor scored a point, which is a significant marker at one of the power hills. Prescott next, bad yellow peril history, bad weather forecast and growing gear ratio superstition. History at the time of writing, but still a virtual future. Watch the next space. Paul
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Gurston
Down is a lot like Shelsley Walsh, fast, a fiddly bit, then fast again. The
speeds are somewhat higher, and whether the absence of steep banks flanking the
track is a good thing is better not tested. Both venues are basically upgraded
farm tracks. Gurston has a much better paddock arrangement at the sacrifice of
some of the historic atmosphere.
My
target for the weekend was to get below 27s. Maintaining the gap in the
championship to Chris Merrick would be a bonus. But the priority was that 26s
run. And I knew Chris had been in the 26 second bracket last year. So when I saw
27.03 on the clock at the finish I was somewhat disappointed. What usually
happens during a runoff is that I do my run, bring the car back and get on with
turning it around for Martin who has probably qualified first or second. It’s
all quite busy and it can be hard to follow what’s going on as the rest of the
runners do their thing. So it was only when we were pushing the car back to the
start for Martin’s run that I realised I was still in the lead. Mike Dean
slotted in somewhere just behind before Scott and Martin showed everybody else
how to do it. So mild disappointment turned into really quite pleased. Third is
a very good result in present company. Best of the rest, who were stacked up
closely behind, would really do quite nicely. Third to tenth covered by half a
second shows how close the competition was. However the near second between
first and third shows the gulf the rest of us are queuing up to cross. Chris had
fallen at the wrong end of the half a second so the championship stuff was
looking OK.
Back
to the hard facts. The Championship was all but sewn up by Martin earlier in the
season with a substantial number of wins. Even if he failed to score any more
points Scott was going to need records from the remaining events to hold on to a
chance of the overall win. As it was they shared the points and nobody took a
record. So Martin maintained his lead, although the unrolling of the discards
showed the gap growing.