Scotland Here We Come

Knockhill- 22nd-23rd July 2023

Race 7, 8 & 9

After some positive testing on Thursday and Friday morning where we had good pace the car developed an issue on Friday afternoon which meant we were down on speed. After changing some sensors on the engine we were hopeful of a good qualifying on Saturday morning.

Qualifying was a struggle with the car still a little slow in a straight line so we were a few tenths down on where we expected to be based on Thursday’s pace. The field was really close around Knockhill’s sub minute lap and we qualified P8 and P11.

Further investigation into the car revealed a broken fuel pump housing and a kink in the fuel line so we changed it for a spare fuel pump and hoped it would fix the issue and get us back on the pace.

In the first race on Saturday afternoon we started in 8th place. A good race and we managed to pick up a place. Another competitor unfortunately had a problem causing him to retire and we finished 6th on the road. We had a scare with a wrongly applied penalty for track limits (a mix up with car numbers), but after penalties were applied correctly we were classified 4th, which was a great result. The car was still a little slow on the straights however so the team set about investigating.

Pro-Alloys Racing found in their investigations that the catalytic converter had blown back a bit, so it was replaced. Hopefully it would solve the power issues.

We started from P7 in the reverse grid race on Sunday morning and struggled. We ended up finishing in 12th place and set about finding the problem. Everything seemed to stem from finding the problem with the fuel pump. It turned out that the replacement just wasn’t up to the job. The team swapped out the original pump into the replacement housing and made a setup tweak to the car. Hopefully we could finally be back on the pace for the final race.

In the final race an incident at turn 1-2 resulted in me spinning and dropping to the back of the field and a safety car. On the restart we were in 21st place. Over the remaining 11 minutes we managed to recover back up to 11th place with the car much better than over the rest of the weekend.

We’re at Cadwell Park in 3 weeks. A track that I was super strong at last year and I’m hoping to turn my luck around and score some big points.

Thanks to Pro Alloys Racing and One Day Motorsport for the effort sorting all the issues we had this weekend. We’ll be back fighting at the next one.