Thanks to everyone who took part in our Autosolo and PCA yesterday. We hope you enjoyed your day. It was dry and sunny even if it was cold but still a vast improvement over the weather at our October event.
Thank you all for sorting out your paperwork prior to the event, it looks like this will be the way of doing things for quite a while.
Some of you may have been aware that we had Colin Clark – Motorsport UK Commercial Director – as a guest and he was very impressed with the driving and the event.
The venue, having lost the best bit of concrete on the whole venue, to HS2 track bedding last year at least was much the same this year. However, the extra bit we added last year had suffered with the heavy rain the day of Last year’s event. For this year I moved the course to avoid the bad bits and brushed away as much loose debris as I could, given the time on the day before the event started, but the so called new bit gradually deteriorated as the day went on.
The event timing, the kit worked very well and could have been run with just 2 people per test. We did have a problem on the first test which took some time to fathom out what it was. It turned out to be down to the flying finish red clock board got clobbered and was not reset properly and it was windy. This meant that the board was upsetting the beam and Time Keeper an action which could not be resolved readily (a blue tooth system between beam and time keeper. ACTION don’t put the beams close to anything that can be hit by a car. Other glitches remain a mystery, but the Double drives with the wrong numbers for the driver accounted for quite a few. This knocked on to this is losing the times of the next few cars so a hold had to be put in. The interval between cars needed to be longer than the old stop watch system. With the Venue being dug up and carted away, this was the only option as the starts and finishes are 100 M away from each other.
I’d like to thank John and Shirley Blackwell for the paperwork, venue hire, and timing arrangements. Also to Colin Minchin for the heavy lift with his trailer and Harvey Warner for the extra help loading and unloading. The effort that goes into the logistics of what is a 2 day event for both of them is considerable.
The timing crew did a sterling job as did John Clavey, who not only competed but brought the new kit and over saw the use of it. Plus John sorted most of the glitches
As Clerk of the Course and the radio control I can’t really comment on who beat who or won overall. Nobody really was upset. A lot of drivers thought the day went quite well. Most seemed to enjoy the event.
Our next Autosolo will be an Finmere on June 6th which will be a non-championship round. The next championship round will be the Boanerges on October 3rd and I hope to see many of you there.
David Smith
Clerk of the Course
Below are some photo’s of the day taken by Harvey Warner.