Race Report – Spa-Francorchamps, June 2011

Leave a Comment June 27, 2011 Priocept Racing

We went to Spa-Francorchamp for round five of the MSA British Endurance Championship after a third place at Thruxton where the race was stopped early due to torrential rain. With the Spa race duration being reduced from two hours to 1 hour 40 minutes, I was to drive the full race, start to finish as a single stint except for the compulsory 90 second pit stop.  Pro driver Fulvio Mussi will be back in the car and teaming up with me again for our next race at Snetterton.

Practice

Friday provided only a one hour free practice session to set the car up, collect fuel consumption data and get used to the circuit having not driven there since October 2010.

Unfortunately the car developed a problem after only a few laps. This was quickly traced to a failed CV boot which was of a different design and batch to our usual parts. Unfortunately we only had more of the same faulty version in our spares package! Plans were quickly made for the required parts to be brought out from the UK, but they wouldn’t arrive until after qualifying on Saturday.

Qualifying

A temporary repair was made on the car to allow three laps in qualifying on Saturday, which is required to be allowed to race. The qualifying session started out damp and on slicks our pace was good, but after stopping as a precaution after three laps with a suspected repeat of Friday’s problem, the circuit dried out, the times dropped and our grid position fell down to the back of the grid.

Race

The required parts arrived late on Saturday and so all day Sunday was spent rebuilding the driveshaft assemblies to ensure trouble free running in the race. The car was off its stands and ready to go just 15 minutes before the 4pm start. The weather was extremely hot, around 30 degrees.

Starting from the back of the grid, good progress was made through the cars ahead on the grid in the slower Production class. All was going well until a battle with a Seat SuperCopa developed – after the run down from the Bus Stop chicane to La Source hairpin he turned into me leaving nowhere to go to take avoiding action except for the pitwall! A hard impact front left resulted. A couple of slowish laps followed to assess the condition of the car, during which the Seat received a drive-through penalty for causing an avoidable accident.  Despite some lose bodywork and problems with the steering geometry the car felt reasonable, good enough to pass another couple of cars, so we pushed on at race pace.

However, as the race settled down towards the one hour mark and the pit stops phase, it started to become evident that the temperatures (and oxygen levels) in the cockpit were becoming unbearable. Maintaining concentration became extremely difficult, but by 1 hour 10 minutes my vision started to become affected and passing out was not beyond the realms of possibility and we really had no choice but to withdraw from the race.

It was even more disappointing to later see that the Ferrari 430 ahead of us in 3rd place in class had a problem and could have been passed to take the last class podium position had we continued.

Next Time…

A proper cockpit cooling solution will be implemented for the next race, which will be the three hour race at Snetterton since we are missing the race at Castle Combe.

Thanks to all the Priocept guys who did a great job standing in at Spa as temporary pit crew while the regular team were away at a different race meeting all weekend.

Update – following the Castle Combe round we stand 8th out of 21 teams in the championship points standing, but with a race in hand having missed Castle Combe, since only the six best results count at the end of the season.  See the current championship standings here.

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