41. Trackday Championship Round 1 - Silverstone National - 23/04/22

Trackday Championship Round 1 - Silverstone National - 23/04/22

Well after 3 year and 8 months since buying the Clio it was time for our first race. Excitement levels were certainly high!

Trailer all packed up, 6 boxes of spares/tools in the big box, spare set of wheels and tyres for the race and 2 gazebos. All fits perfectly.

Getting unpacked on the Thursday evening ready for the test day on the Friday. We had never been to Silverstone so was hoping to get some decent practice in during the test day. 

Testing was all going well until the last 5 minutes of the last session when I started to hear a noise from the front, sounded like brakes, so came in to take a look. Turned out to be a front left wheel bearing! Not what you needed at 5 o'clock the day before your first race. Wheel nut had come loose again! We had spare bearings and hubs with us, just no way of changing it. Went round the whole paddock asking for a press or bearing puller kit, nothing. Was surprised I kept getting a funny look when asking for tools like that assumed people would have had something.

I was literally minutes away from jumping in the car to drive home (450 miles round trip) to change a bearing. But someone on the cliosport.net Facebook group said he was near by and had a press in his garage and we were more than welcome to give it ago changing it. So was worth ago. Anyway turned out Tony was literally a few minutes down the road, sure enough with a lovely press which popped the bearing out without a problem. He also changed our wheel studs over whilst we chatted.

So a massive thank you to Tony Hunter for rescuing us late on a Friday night! We were so lucky that he got in touch on the Facebook group otherwise it would have been an awful night having to drive home! Like to be able to repay the favour to someone else one day, so if you are ever stuck around the Newcastle area then give me a shout.

Anyway race day came and we were just hoping for an incident free day and we'd come away happy. Sure enough, qualified 6th in class and finished 6th in class, thankfully that really wasn't last in class so we were delighted.

This is us two grinning from ear to ear. Was a rather good day.

This is the race video if anyone is interested. A very steady/nervous first few laps but slowly get into it.

More importantly! What did we learn and what do we want to change moving forward?

• First thing is loctite your wheel nuts, once we used loctite on the wheel nuts we haven't had another problem of them coming loose since.
• Secondly we really dislike the shifter, I don't know if its because we have extended the linkage to move the shifter rearwards and its made it worse but you just have no confidence you are going to find a gear. Had a few times going into copse (5th to 4th) and missed the gear which meant we ended up going far to deep into the corner. So we were determined to try and sort a self centring shifter out (wait for the next post, turned out rather well!).
• We needed to have a good play with setup, although we were pretty close the car still wouldn't rotate as well as we wanted. 

We also decided to miss round 2 at Cadwell as round 3 at Anglesey was only 2 weeks later.