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Testing 1
I was confident of a good weekend at Motorland, we had a very encouraging test in September. So with high confidence in myself and the car, we as a team decided to seek extra performance through the setup of the car, and different brake set ups. However as we had to use tyres from my previous race at Nurburgring, which were badly flat spotted, and a few other small problems, it was hard to make any progress in the first test session.
Testing 2
Despite the few problems in the first session, I was still very motivated for preparing the car for a qualifying simulation in the second session. I used most of the session to prepare new brake pads and discs, during which I also had a good feel for the balance of the car. With everything sorted, and all of the small problems ironed out , we put on new tyres and went about setting a time. The setup we have found means that the first 2 laps on new tyres are the fastest, so straight away I shot up to the top of the timesheets. After a while, others improved and we ended up in p10. This seems to be our performance limit with the equipment and resources we have. However the times are very close, and an improvement of 1 tenth could move you up 4 places! With this in mind, we worked very hard to analyse the places where we could be losing the tiniest amounts of time.
Saturday
Superpole, After qualifying for Superpole in the mornings grouped session (16th overall), I had asked for a few last minute changes to be made before we went out for Superpole, this delayed us slightly and we lost a warm up lap, but it was worth it, as the improvements found us 2 tenths from the first session, I did 2 identical laps, which put me p9 for the start of both races, again it was incredibly close, but if we hadn't improved from the morning, I would have been starting from 15th!
Race 1
I had a very good start and opening lap, making up 3 places on the first corner and another place half way around the lap up the inside of the very tricky turn 11. I was in 5th place, and had build up a 2 second cushion from drivers behind. I was catching the car ahead (Kevin Magnussen) and had a few attempts at overtaking him. But disaster struck, my rear tyres massively overheated after around 6 laps, they were starting to blister. Suddenly I went from pushing the leaders to watching the pack behind catch me as if I was standing still. I was losing 2 seconds per lap. Despite this, I was determined to hang on for points, for the rest of the race I found myself wheel to wheel defending, out braking my rivals despite the fact that my rear tyres were literally falling apart. Eventually I dropped to 10th, as I was having to lift or brake on easy flat out corners, I was very happy with myself in salvaging one point! But at the same time bitterly disappointed in losing a possible podium finish.
Race 2
After our problems in the first race, we were instructed to opt for a safer setup for the second race, this wasn't ideal, as we had no idea how the car would behave or if it would be competitive. The start of the race was ok again, I moved up to 7th position, straight away I could feel that the tyres were not yet up to optimal temperature, I was struggling to hang on but I kept my head down and stuck at it. I was keeping the same pace as the people ahead, knowing that in a few laps I was going to get a lot faster. Then before I knew it, on the 3rd lap at the hairpin, my fortunes went for the worst, and I was hit from behind and spun. I had to wait for all the cars to go by, and rejoined in dead last, about 24th position.
Annoyingly, about a lap after I got going again, the car started to come into its own, and I was setting the fastest laps of the race while chasing down the pack, its never over till the flag drops, so I wanted to make up as many places as possible. I caught the pack up after 4 laps, and wasted no time in overtaking them, I didn't spend more than 5 corners behind any cars. Eventually I reached 16th position, even with a leaking gearbox from my huge hit!
The last race of the year was very disappointing but hugely encouraging at the same time. We had pace for a podium in both races. I felt very good in the car, at times I didn't want to stop!
Roll on next year!
Posted: 02.11.2009