I have to confess that it was a very nice feeling to eventually get in a decent performance with GTL. Grats to all those who finished and to Wiley who kept me honest for the whole race where one big mistake on my part could have changed the result.
When the away team at Blue Moose Racing saw "Anglesey" as the venue last week, I thought we would be in trouble. A new track, and as I had missed the first round in this championship some new cars to get to grips with as well
. The technical department ( Mabel and Arnold Glutbucket) set about planning the visit to these foreign shores, somewhere off the North Coast of Wales.
Money is tight at Blue Moose, so the Boss "Bob Kayak Bob" "the ever revolving head honcho around these parts" passed a plain brown envelope to the assembled team and sent us on our way with a motivational speech which was difficult to hear through his clenched cigar, but sounded like "now bugger off you bunch of losers". We had assumed that the envelope contained cash for our expenses, but we discovered otherwise when we stopped to fill the transporter with diesel and passed the cashier 6 Mcdonald's children's meal vouchers!!!
Eventually we reached the Welsh coast and had to find a way across the water ( it was only on the way home that we discovered that there is actually a bridge!!!).
Arnold, being the resourceful neanderthal that he is, stole a skip from a local building site and whittled two large oars from a couple of scaffold planks. Mabel helped lift the Anglebox into the skip, once we had it in the water , grumbles about "we should have used the Mini" were ignored. We all climbed aboard and Arnold gallantly passed Mabel the oars and suggested she got on with it.
We ran aground on a shingle beach just below the circuit, which had nothing to do with navigational skill and more to do with the prevailing wind...Arnold's prevailing wind!!! which we were trying to get away from.
We used Mabel's corsets to fashion a large slingshot that fired the car up the cliffs and into the paddock. The crossing and watching Mabel's face as she strained and heaved on those oars had left me exhausted, so I grabbed a few hours sleep before qually started.
True to form they forgot to wake me and I found myself with only a few minutes to post a laptime. I rushed out onto the track with race fuel and somehow posted a pole position lap once the tyres were warmed up. I was a little surprised and somewhat nervous to find myself on pole against the more experienced members hereabouts, but I was more concerned with a strange addition to the dashboard and was going to ignore it....
But, Arnold had been reading about the latest F1 engines and had "improvised" his own KERS system on the Anglia. If I had known before taking to the track I might have demanded that he remove it
but there was no time.
One would not have thought that attaching one end of Mabel's knicker elastic to the prop shaft and bolting the other to the floor pan beneath my seat could store so much kinetic energy!!!. All Arnold had said was "When you get to the straight brace yourself, pull that red lever and hold on to the steering wheel....really hold on!!".......geez!! he was not kidding.
Henry Ford had never dreamed that his Anglia could reach escape velocity I am sure, the little red pointy thing on the dashboard went around twice and flew off as the scenery rushed towards me. I just wish Arnold's enthusiasm had extended to the braking dept too, as getting the thing slowed for that nasty left hander at the end of the straight was my biggest problem. A couple of times we exited that corner firmly on 2 wheels, or rather not very firmly, on two wheels.
TBH I was worried that I was pushing too hard early on and it might bite me back with worn tyres in later laps. So once I had a 3 second lead, I settled down to maintain the gap and watched Wiley Coyote's mini as I exited the hairpin each lap, just to be sure that he was not launching a surprise attack.
Steadily the gap grew and I was able to ease back in the final laps still with plenty of rubber to play with, both in the tyre dept and the elastic KERS dept!! ( is "KERS" an abbreviation of knicKERS? I wonder).
Really enjoyed screaming the Anglia around this track and finally having the confidence to seriously abuse the engine and still not losing more than 1% on health....we are learning.
The Evil has landed .....
need to practice with some of the other tintops for the next rounds.