Harewood Hillclimb June 2nd

Sunday was a beautiful day and the run over to Harewood was great apart from in Ottley where some prat had been changing round diversion signs and I ended up turning the car and trailer round in a cul de sac!. I got to the site at 7:15  and unloaded the car and parked the tow car and trailer. After parking the sprint car in its alotted place I went to have a look at the cars in my class. which consisted of a Subaru and a Ferrari 308. After scruitineering the Subaru was moved to a different class as it had a huge none original rear spoiler. The Ferrari was a beautiful car and well prepared though it was still road legal.

I tried to remember all the things I had learnt at the Hillclimb school in April, the only problem was things happen much quicker at competitive speeds. I had set my self a target of being in the 73 seconds at the end of the day and my first run was 76 .??seconds so some way to go. I changed a few things for the second practice run and clipped a bit of my time. As there were only 83 competitors we managed to get the first real timed run in prior to lunch and again I reduced my times slightly.

During the lunch break I realised that a had to change things more radically and in two places went for third gear instead of holding second, this together with not braking on two of the bends gave me a time of sub 75 seconds. I figured the other place I was losing time was on the quarry bend complex, which consists of an uphill blind fast right hand bend followed by a short straight of about10 yards followed by a tight right hand bend to th finnish line. I had already decided that a set of lights near the top was the place to back of the throttle and then brake like hell on the short straight whilst changing down to second for the last tight bend. Seems easy in theory, but going into a blind bend with Armco barriers a yard away at over 70 mph is not easy!

Any way I held the car on full throttle as long as I dared and managed a best time of 73. 76 seconds on my last run and was chuffed to bits at achieveing my target time.

I had been looking at getting some slick tyres for the car but the Toyo 888′s were fine and I think I would be better spending the money and getting my nether regions surgically enhanced. Lesson learnt is the less you brake the faster you go! obvious really. Can’t wait for the next event there which is the 25th of August.