With a turnout of six drivers, everyone with eligible cars got an opportunity to race in all three classes - Porsche Cup, Historic Saloon and Vintage Sports. Because of the relatively few drivers and in anticipation of others possibly turning up late, we ran qualifying one car at a time with a one minute session per car. In what portended very close racing in the class, Alex and I qualified our Escorts in the first two positions for Historic Saloon 0.014 seconds apart, with Kyle in my revamped Lotus Cortina not far behind. Steve arrived with an Escort with extremely fast straight-line speed, but it was unable to stay with the others on the many FRC corners. Luke outdrove everyone in Porsche Cup qualifying to take pole with Kyle running a close second, while I managed to be quickest for Vintage Sports in my Ferrari 275P, just ahead of the Ferrari 250 GTO/LM of Luke.
We have been seeing so much damage to cars that for the races I decided to activate the "Track Call" button on all hand controllers to cut power to the track, the idea being to allow any driver to temporarily stop the race in the event of a blocked track resulting from one or more de-slotted cars. During the course of the night we changed the setting to slow cars instead of stopping them, but the jury is still out about the idea of having track calls since the races can become very disrupted. I for one would like to go back to our normal method since I find the flow of the races being interrupted spoils some of the fun.
Before racing started, I thought it fitting to mention that the date - 7th April - was the 43rd anniversary of the death of one of the greatest drivers in history, Jim Clark.
As usual, the Porsche Cup races were close and competitive, with a mix of drivers finishing in the top places during the night. In the end this resulted in a 3-way tie for first place in the class championship. Things might have been different had Kyle not missed the first race in the class, since he was the second-fastest in qualifying. At one point, Historic Saloon saw an epic battle between Alex, Kyle and myself, the three cars running several laps nose to tail and alongside one another. Luke did well to place second in the final class race in his less-than-competitive BMW Mini (he was just over a second off-pace in qualifying). Vintage Sports was a pretty close contest too as Alex got his GT40 going better than ever and was able to run at or near the front much of the night. Kyle in my Ken Mikes GT40 was no slouch either (while he was in the slot), and Luke took his Ferrari 250 GTO/LM to victory in the third race. A surprise in the class was Steve driving my Cobra Daytona, eventually placing third overall in the class championship. After having his best ever result at our last event, Laird had one of his less-successful nights, his McLaren in particular being very much off the needed pace.
With no B-subgroups to race, we closed the night sometime around 11:00 PM, an early night for FRC.
Congratulations to all the race and class winners and to Steve for his Index of Performance win.
Next event's classes: American Muscle, GT, LMP - see the regulations here.
See you on the circuit...
Gordon