As only five drivers were present when it was time to start our Ferrari Team Challenge and Rally event, we realised that the "Team" aspect would not be possible for the FTC races and reverted to straight Ferrari IROC racing. This effectively created a new "class" which I simply dubbed "Ferrari Challenge".
While the first race was in progress, Luke arrived and joined the class from the second race on, allowing us to run the planned six races, although still without teams. The Ferraris were very closely matched (except perhaps the number 1 car which had a clear power disadvantage) and each driver got to do a race with each car, as is always the case with our IROC classes. This combined with just 20-lap races instead of our usual 30-lappers resulted in some very close finishes - you could be leading one lap then last the next if you had a de-slot, with 33% fewer laps to try to make it back up before the finish. There were four different race winners with two of them doing repeat wins, making the final points tally a pretty close thing.
Prior to the start of competition, the prime focus of on-track practice was with the rally cars. Ramesh and Luke B arived with two new machines, an MG Metro and a Peugeot 406, both of which were competitive from the onset. Nicholas E brought along the Ferrari he had been prepping for the rally class and Luke arrived with his Corolla and these too were also quite quick. I had done some work on my Alpine 310 and got it in the same time bracket as the rest, around 9.5 sec, but then Steve raised the bar once more by producing a 9.2 sec time with his very fast Subaru Impreza. It was shaping up to be a very competitive night of rally stages. Just before racing started I had a wild spin in my Alpine which snapped the guide flag drop-arm in two, forcing its retirement. Then Nicholas had run out of time and had to leave before the stages began, thus two competitive cars were out of it before competition began. I pulled out my old Impreza but it was about a second off-pace, but still better than nothing. We had increased the number of stages from three to five, so everyone thus had more opportunity to either get it very right or very wrong.
The results
Congratulations to the winners.
2013 Overall Class Points Update
Next event's classes: Mini Challenge - 6 races @ 20 laps, Restricted GT - 5 races @ 25 laps, Slot.It Challenge - 5 races @ 25 laps. Don't forget to see the updated fastest times for the FRC classes to know what the benchmarks are for your cars, the updated class average qualifying times and the updated 2013 Class Points Standings..
See you on the circuit...
Gordon