RBB Round 1 – Buckmore Park

All in all, it was a good performance at Buckmore Park. We showed we've got the pace to be right up the front of the field and, apart from some small problems, we would have been. I can't be bothered to repeat someone else's work, so below is the press release we issued for the Club 100 report.

We arrived at Buckmore hoping to challenge for a podium, but were ultimately pretty happy with 5th place in the circumstances. We had the worst handling kart we've ever experienced with Club 100 – massive understeer. With hindsight we should have pulled a prima donna and had it changed, but thought maybe it was a characteristic of all the new chassis. As the race went on, however, it became clear that while everyone else was enjoying a dry day at Buckmore, we were the only team driving in the wet…

Somehow new team member Peter O'Connor dragged the thing round to 4th in qualifying, leaving Dan Gore to make (in his own words) an absolutely dreadful start. He was still in the leading snake of karts though, until he was black flagged, apparently for hitting an invisible cone. This lost us over a lap and put us back to 31st.

Thanks to some quick and aggressive driving from Simon Young, and seemingly everyone falling off at the start of the second hour (Dan spent 2 laps behind a back marker waiting for a corner without yellow flags), we were back in 6th with 20 mins to go. This left Peter with one stint during which to make up half a lap on Piston Broke, which he managed with a few laps to spare, justifying his new place as team ringer. With a pit-stop technique refined through previous years in Club 100’s British Universities Karting Championship, this should be a good season for RBB, so long as we can avoid both the kart we had at round 1 and those tricky phantom cones.

The report even does me the honour of omitting the spin I had in my second stint! Here's a superb photo of me, trying to counter the understeer by throwing my weight on to the outside front wheel:

: 28 Feb 2006 13:37 |  Tags: Karting Motorsport Rbb |  Comments (5) |  Report a problem