45. Trackday Championship Round 5 - Brands Hatch GP

We booked a trackday at croft as a bit of a test before the race at brands. Rebuilt gearbox, new cooling setup and we hadn't driven the car in a while. So check over the car and checked the alignment before heading to croft.
Trackday went well, unfortunately was damp but it served its purpose. Coolant temp a little higher as we expected due to now cooling the gearbox oil. 
We managed to give some different rear springs ago. Changed from 80 to 110. Certainly made a good improvement. Much more neutral than previous (previous was too understeery), however not the best to try it on a wet track, had a little moment. Never really looks much on camera but certainly made my bum twitch.

During the day we tried adding spacers to the bonnet hinges to allow better airflow through the engine bay, seemed to make a decent difference, assuming that lack of any radiator ducting isn't helping.

Bit of a clean up, pack up all the kit again and it was time to head off to brands hatch. Oh and obviously it was during the heatwave at the start of August!! Also updated the EcuMaster ADU display to make the temperature gauges clearer and less cluttered.

Man brands hatch is a long way! We had a decent trip down but still took 7.5 hours.

I pulled the trigger on hiring a garage for the test day on the Friday, we were in the garages on the Saturday for race day and didn't fancy being stuck in the sun all day. Turns out it was a great call. Got up to 36 on the test day and 38 on Raceday so rather toasty!

Shooting some flames on the test day with Russ in one the Unique Racing cars following behind. We were certainly off the pace but kind of expected as it was our first time at the track. James was certainly getting more in the groove of the track than I (Fred) was, this is what usually happens. For some reason I take a while to learn the tracks.

The test day was on the Indy track and the race the GP. So Qualifying was going to be the first time we drove the GP track. We Qualified 28th, 7th in class, 4-5 seconds off the leaders and James was a good few seconds quicker than myself. I got frustrated in the race for my lack of pace. Luckily a safety car came out early so James took over and brought the car home 20th overall, 6th in class. Which looking back on it was great to finish and for our first trip there shouldn't have expected anything more. But much more importantly a good weekend, the car was all in one piece and we haded melted. Next race at Donington where we had been a couple times before so hoping for better things.