Attended the Clio200.net How Fast? event on Saturday. A wee blurb copy and pasted over from there:
Little update/blog post How Fast?
The little green one performed flawlessly the 370 miles down to Bedford, the 370 miles back from Bedford and the hammering she received at Bedford. Managed to get down on one tank however the pace was much quicker on the return journey so used 1.25 tanks.
The day didnt start off to good. When convoying to the Autodrome Ashley (AGPEsseEsse) pulled alongside and said I had a wobbly rear driver side wheel. This obviously is worrying at the time but after some investigation (And with the help on MikeH's jack) I had it nipped up and ready to rock. As the wheel is relatively new they are still quite tight when putting on the hubs but got it sorted not long after the first session began.
Look at all these Clios:
The event then started with sign on as usual then we had the Palmersport factory tour which was superb, then the highly embarrassing birthday cake presentation:
Cool cake:
We then had the drivers briefing and went straight over to the west circuit pits (No time to eat cake unfortunately).
Lined up waiting to do the "sighting laps" behind the X5:
As above, had to fix my "wobbly wheel" before I could think about heading out. Once fixed I grabbed my instructor Pat and headed out for my first experience of Bedford West. Glad I had tuition as I definitely wouldn't have driven the car/track as hard as I did. Think it was Roger200 that said after my first 5 laps (Thats all Pat said I needed) I had already beaten Fernandez's best time from last year (Not bragging here but that was on a full tank to lol).
Anyhoo! Adjusted the tyre pressures after dropping Pat off and Gregg asked for some passenger laps. Did quite a few whilst getting more and more familiar with the track, to the point I missed the tight chicane on the back straight from just going too late on the brakes lol.
Dropped Gregg off in the pits, adjusted pressures once more and went out for the first time on my own. Really got to put the hammer down and found myself using getting quicker everywhere particularly the first chicane where I was hitting the limiter in 3rd and leaving it there but then found that catching 4th quickly then stamping (And I mean stamping hard) the brakes was so much quicker.
The first timed session was done on 3 quarters of a tank and managed a 1.29.2 (0.6 seconds faster than my best from the practice). This was good enough to beat Mentalpen (2nd place) by 2.2 seconds.
First practice and timed sessions:
Tripodding:
The second practice session found me improving my times yet again. I put this down to the fuel burning off. Managed to nip under the 1.29 second mark which pleased me. I knew Kenny (Ashton) was gonna be good so kept battering around finding ways to improve my lap times.
The second timed session was done with 0.3 of a tank of fuel and managed a 1.28.6 which was 0.2 slower than I had managed in the second practice but still enough to beat Ashton (2nd place) by a few hundreds under 2 seconds.
Where did the time come from? I say the majority of it was the tyres. I was the only 1 running semi-slicks and from being followed by Ashton, he wasn't far off on the AD08s.
Second practice and timed sessions:
Blurry pic but I think the car looks quite mean:
A pic of the winner (Me) and last (Buddyboy) wearing his new "I failed at How Fast?" t-shirt:
The winner and his beast:
Will stick my favorite pics up from the photographers tomorrow once they are all uploaded.
Today I swapped the wheels back over to my other OZ Ultras equipped with Yoko AD08s in order to keep the A048s good for their next test which may well be the next How Fast? event. Also gave her a good wash to get rid of the thousands of dead bugs off the front. See here for how bad it was:
Also have my 2nd timed session video uploading to YT but its taking ages to get there. Will stick that up when its done.
