Despite the sudden night rain and other distractions, we had eight drivers present to compete in our first F1 and Vintage Sports races for 2011. After my mentioning the new Index of Performance award earlier this week, Paul arrived with a neat little trophy which he donated to the cause. This is the first time we've actually had a physical award to recognise anyone's achievements at FRC, so thanks Paul!
It took a while to get going, but when we did at some time after ten in the evening, both qualifying and racing went smoothly and quickly. Luke produced a pretty and extraordinarily fast Dallara to compete in F1. In practice Nicholas got down to a 5.1xx time with it within just a few laps, so the tone was set for the F1 class for the night. Needless to say, the results bore this out with no one being able to realistically compete with this rocket. Generally, the F1 races were good affairs with side-by-side dicing and relatively few de-slots. In a night where several cars were shared between two drivers, Laird shared my Dallara after my Renault was damaged in qualifying.
The Vintage Sports class saw Laird appear with a new Revell-Monogram anglewinder McLaren M6A which had some toes in a straight line but was a bit hairy in the turns. Nicholas spent a little time truing its tyres on my tyre-truer and this made it a lot more drivable. He did the same with Paul's Ford GT Mk IV which he shared with Paul for the night and got it going so well that it turned an eye-popping sub-seven second time to grab pole for a class which normally sees mid-seven to eight second times. My Lola T70 and Luke's Ferrari 250 GTO, second and third on the grid respectively, were separated by one-thousandth of a second! Boo and Alex shared my Cobra Daytona and surprised everybody by placing second, fourth and first in the three class races, ending up second in the championship for the night!
By night's end it was pretty clear who the class winners were, but the other places were less obvious and none more so than the winner of our new award, the Index of Performance. Scan through the results below to reveal the winner(s).
So there you have it - a tie for the inaugural Index of Performance award. Congratulations to Laird and the Boo/Alex team effort in that unlikely Cobra Daytona. Congrats too to the two class winners.
Next event's classes: American Muscle, GT, LMP - see the regulations here (date to be announced).
See you on the circuit...
Gordon