What a weekend! The weekend that very almost didn't happen..!
First of all I was to collect a pitbike in Perth on the way down, which I then had to drive to Aberfeldy for, and then the guy never gave me his address so we had to just leave with our tight schedule to get down to Snetterton... So we went on our way to Andrew Lamont Motorsport to pick up the car, but then we found out that FedEx hadn't delivered our clutch for the car (cutting it fine I know), so we had to divert to Glasgow to pick up a solid flywheel/clutch kit for the car! Then back to ALM to fit to the car, and then finally on the road around 6pm on the Wednesday..!
So a long haul down the road and we finally got into the paddock around 5am, probably waking up everyone in the process!!
Anyway off to bed we went for testing at 9am... That never happened! We were awake at 9, but not alot of proper driving would have happened... So another few hours sleep until 12am and testing finally started! Testing went VERY well! We went straight into a great ALM set up car, which is always great but at the same time you always wonder if there is more there!? So we made a few changes which continued to be great! Last year when we had the car at Snetterton we didn't have the diff, splitter or spoiler so these additions took some getting used to around the track! Alot more speed carried around the corners!!
Onto Roadsports qualifying. We had the "day off" on Friday, so this was on Saturday. We were getting some pretty decent times compared to our testing on Thursday, the top drivers were very close in Class C of the roadsports, and we managed to get 4th in class. The race itself is similar to Club Enduro, but is a 45 minute race with a compulsory 1 minute pit stop/driver change half way through, with a rolling start. I started in the car, managed to get us up to a solid 2nd off the start, then even a glimpse of 1st (as you'll see in the video), but unfortunately the tyres we were using were well used from previous races/qualifying/testing (usual drivers excuse...) so we just went backwards from there. Still, we started 4th and finished 4th so can't complain too much!
Onto the Sunday, Club Enduro day! We qualified again in the morning for this, but with brand new tyres this time! We didn't manage to get as fast a time as Roadsports quali due to the track conditions, but we managed to put the car on class pole!
The race itself was a race of managing to hold onto the lead, which was more difficult than it sounds! There were alot of new drivers on the grid, and higher powered/classed cars mixed in with us making choosing your lines and times to overtake very critical (again as you'll see in the video). We had a very good pit stop, I think our best yet! Fuel in and driver swap just a few seconds over the mandatory 3 minutes. At the end of the race we managed to come home with the WIN! 54 seconds infront of 2nd place, which was a great margin to have considering we started running out of fuel towards the end of the race!! Lift and coast was definitely needed on the last few laps...
We would like to thank everybody that was involved in helping us achieve our first win in the 750MC Club Enduro series!
Andrew Lamont Motorsport
Opie Oils
Part-box.com
TTV Racing Components
Black Diamond Performance
750MC
Everyone else that was supporting us over the weekend!
Music: www.purple-planet.com