Sidcup Round 6

Every once in a while there's one of those nights where you realise why we are involved in this hobby, and tonight was one of them :)

After the last few weeks, where myself and Jordan have been making it into the B final and having a great race during qualifying, we were moved up into a higher heat for qualifying. This meant that Jordan was 1st in the third heat, and Terry, Charlie and myself were in the 4th heat (I was off the line in 6th place).

Rnd 1: ended up 2nd behind Phil but the car seemed to be diving into each corner.
Rnd 2: I put a roll bar on the front of the car to try and help with the diving problem and also changed the gear ratio from 5.29 to 5.1 Now that may seem like a small change but it meant that I had a little more top speed, and combined with the car rolling through the corners a bit better, meant that I got into 1st place after Phil had an issue with his bodyshell and let me through.
Rnd 3: Started from 1st this time, and Terry had the bit between his teeth and was chasing me down from the first few laps !!!
At one point the tannoy said that he was leading, but both of us were confused by that as he hadn't overtaken me so far in the race. I'm guessing it was becasue he was lapping faster than me during that part of the race. By the end of the 5 minutes there was 2-3 seconds between us with me slightly in front of Terry. Our qualifying runs meant that we had qualified in the A final, so we must have been doing something right !

Out of the F1 people who seem to be competing for the championship, Terry and I could get 100 or 99 points depending on who won, and Jordan and Charlie (who were in the B final) had a battle for 98 or 97 points)

Final:
Pole: Peter
2nd: Stewart
3rd: Billy
4th: Me :)
5th: Steve
6th: Terry

After the first corner where Billy clipped the apex and i nipped through, I was running behind Stewart and Peter in 3rd place. I thought to myself "WHAT???" but carried on anyway :)

This was one of those races that comes along every now and again where it's just pure fun, but at the same time the quality of driving was great. I tried to keep ahead of Billy, but inevitably he was going to get past me. The problem was I couldn't tell if it was him of Terry as they both had their shells painted black.

Terry was my main competitor in this race though.
He got by me and got about 1/2 a lap up about a third of the way into the race. I got back into a rhythm and started to catch him up during the 2nd third of the race, eventually got past and managed to pull out a little bit of a gap from him. That didn't last long though as he started catching me up pretty soon !!!

I could see him and Billy coming up behind me as the race was coming to an end, but couldn't make out who was who. I came into the last chicane thinking "oh no that's Terry" and before i realised what happened, I'd overshot the corner and hit Billy (sorry mate). We got going again and I let him past at the end of the straight. Now it was the last lap and Terry was right behind me, but I'd managed to squeeze under the timing loop just before the buzzer, with Terry just after which meant I got the extra lap in and ended up 4th, with Terry 5th.

I got a 100 points for it, but my word it was hard-earned ! My hands were shaking for about 10 minutes after the final had finished and the grin on mine and Terry's faces lasted even longer !

Well done Terry for making it one of the most fun races I've ever been involved in.

Special mention to Peter: you need to calm down on the rostrum and most definitely don't shout at people to "MOVE" especially when the thing you're shouting at is actually a barrier you've hit because you turned in too early. That just makes you look silly :p