dbRacing- Open Race Report Castle Combe 26th May 2003

Porsche Open Race Report Castle Combe 26th May 2003

Practice

Following the previous days exploits at Croft I decided that additional track time was needed if I was to have a chance of a decent result in the Porsche Club race. Having done the paperwork to get an entry for the race it was time to throw some spanners at the car and I made some ride height, damper and camber changes. Going out on track for the first time the car did feel better and I got some reasonable times quite quickly. Even with all the GT3's 964's etc I was actually about 6th on the grid after the first three laps. I started to try and get some quicker laps in as my times were nowhere near where I would need to be in the Club race but I continued to suffer from understeer which doesn't instil confidence and compromised my times quite severely. The last thing you need at Castle Combe is understeer at Camp Corner. Camp is a very fast corner, with a narrow exit and little run off. Worse than that if you do go off it's right in front on the pits so everyone can see !

I completed practice and was some 4 seconds slower than my times here last year, but on the bright side I was not last and I had some ideas of what to do to get the car working better.

Race

Still not happy with the car after the Club practice I made some more changes to the car settings to try and continue the improvement. It was obvious from the the first couple of laps of the race that these changes were not working and so I decided to treat the race as yet another test session and pulled into the pits. Assisted by Janet Ingram, Gill removed the bonnet and passed me the tools to adjust the dampers. It took longer to get belted back into the car than it did to make the adjustments, but I was back out on track in less than a minute and only lost one lap in the process. By now there was no-one to chase and it was simply a matter of keeping on eye on the mirrors to make sure I didn't get in the way of the faster cars including a 935 and a 996 GT2. Adam Egar had also pitted in his 911SC and he caught me towards the end of the race. I crossed the line less than two tenths ahead of him but in fact he was a lap ahead as we took the final two finishing places of the race.