Things are picking up again at FRC. Ten drivers showed up to do battle in Porsche Cup, Vintage Sports and F1 last night in what turned out to be a night full of on-track action. For the Porsche Cup races, cars were once again set to a specific controller for the night and drivers used the car/controller matching their qualifying positions for race one and their finishing positions in the previous race for all subsequent races. In my case, I ended up driving the same Porsche for all my races, but others moved around based on their finishing positions in the races. As usual the Porsches proved to be a big challenge with the Slot.It 21,500 RPM motors on otherwise stock cars (original tyres and single magnet only). Being a potential winner depended on keeping one's head and driving as smoothly as possible, not risking super-fast laps. It didn't help that, from race two, drivers were coming from very fast and sticky F1 cars.
For both Porsche Cup and Vintage Sports we ended up having A and B sub-groups with five drivers in each group. Speaking of Vintage Sports, this has to be the most beautiful and technically-varied group of cars at FRC to date. Based on sports and prototype cars from the sixties, last night saw three Ford GT 40s, two Lola T70s, two Ferraris - one a 250 GTO/LM, the other a 275P, a Ford GT MkIV, a McLaren M6A and a Daytona Cobra, with no two cars sharing the same livery. Between these ten cars there were five different chassis and two different motor types. Despite all this, the racing was fast, furious and close (for the most part). We also saw the previous class lap record pretty much shattered, coming down from 6.910 sec to what appeared to be an incredible 5.800 sec, however this was evidently an erroneous time as the car that set it wasn't able to get close to it after (it may have been re-slotted badly during qualifying, cutting out part of the track). Regardless, the new official qualifying lap record now stands at 6.599 sec, 0.311 quicker than before. I know that my Ferrari 275P was doing consistent 6.4 sec laps in practice, so the bar has definitely been raised.
F1 was in another league entirely. Change spreads very fast in the competitive arena of FRC and, since Luke's special-build Dallara destroyed all previous F1 records at the last F1 event, we saw a slew of similarly-prepared Dallaras appear last night. The king of the hill was Alex who lowered the previous lap record from Luke's 5.364 sec to an impressive 5.210 sec. Only two actual F1 cars appeared on the grid, a testament to the popularity and competitive advantage of the rule-bending Dallara tricks now being employed. There have been several calls recently to split the class into true F1 cars and a separate class for IRL cars. This may come about soon enough at this rate.
An enjoyable Thursday night once more at FRC, with the last hangers-on leaving over an hour after the last race, close to 2:00 AM.
Congratulations to the class championship winners and to Laird for his Index of Performance win.
Next event's classes: American Muscle, GT and LMP - see the regulations here (probably next Thursday... I'll confirm).
See you on the circuit...
Gordon