Time Attack 2023 Round 7 – Brands Hatch
Before I knew it, its was the penultimate round of the 2023 Time Attack season from Brands Hatch. After an eventful R6 at Donington while taking a trip through the gravel, the fuel cell protection cover (which did its job perfectly) was severely damaged. consequently, new one had to be fabricated. We also had the added drama of a trailer tyre failure during the journey down, luckily there was no damage and a quick tyre change got us on our way.
Warm Up
This warm up session was a little different as we had some of the Honda Racing Championship cars out with us doing their free practice session. This was due to how tightly packed the days schedule was. With very limited space, I went out to give the car a once over. I did feel the car had a sticky rear caliper which was inspected after the session and freed off.
Practice
With the Hondas no longer with us it was time to push a little harder and get a feel for the grip levels on track while scrubbing in a brand new pair of tyres on the front axle. I also attempted different lines through the corners to see if I could find any time. This proved very useful as I found keeping a tight line through Druids was better for than the wider line. This was the same into Clearways, handy information to carry through the afternoon
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Qualifying
It was straight down to business, putting all the ideas from the morning sessions into practice, after a couple of warm up laps I went into my first flying lap which was a fairly strong lap of 51.837 which put me 1st place in class. I returned to the pits to check tyre pressures and they were a little low, so we raised the pressure all round to see if it made the car feel any better. Back out on track the car felt livelier through corners and on my next lap managed to register a 51.749 which was enough to take P1 in qualifying, bagging 10 points and bringing the championship closer. It was also a new Personal best around the Indy circuit!
Final
For the final we decided to take a little rear wing out as it set to a large angle of attack. I also worked out the championship points and it appeared that all I needed was P2 in the final to claim the championship. With this knowledge, I set a banker lap of a 53.163 followed closely by a 52.180. Knowing this was almost certainly enough for P2 it was time to just enjoy the rest of the session.
Annoyingly though, on the next attempt I lost the ability to select 2nd 4th & 6th gear so I returned to the pits. Luckily it wasn’t a major fault and team go me out again in no time. On the first flying lap back out I was up by over 0.600 on my PB through turn 1 and 2 but on the exit of 2 there was a sudden loss of boost.
Initially I thought a boost hose had popped off but then I noticed plumes of smoke coming from the rear of the car, I pulled up at a Marshalls post and got out, luckily the smoke stopped immediately which pointed towards a turbo issue rather than engine failure.
Although not official, the championship should now be wrapped up with no enough points available for me to be caught!