Grats to tris on a dominant win and Axel for a 2nd spot well defended.
This is a Marmite circuit. It seems that you either love it or hate it and Clermont has never been one of my favourites. I usually like challenging tracks, but this one I find frustrating as I never seem to find the sweet spot.
For last nights race I changed my normal favourite car ( 2litre Brab BRM ) and simply chose something different because I did not expect to survive to the flag.
Found an old setup for the Eagle Climax from my archives and did a few laps on race fuel to get a feel for it. The surprise was that it felt really stable and the 2.7ltr engine had loads of grunt out of slow corners and up the hill.
Tris was super fast on pole and Axel was also in the baby Brabham, with Dean in a 2.7 Brab 4th looked about the best I good even dream of. Sure enough the lead trio raced away off the grid and I was struggling to hang on. But gradually I was finding more and more speed in the Eagle and started to gain on Axel in 3rd. I made a few mistakes and lost ground when I should have got closer to Axel, and it was when I was chasing him again that Dean leapt over the grass bank to ambush me
For the moment I thought that both our races were going to end right there, but somehow I tightened the line and somehow avoided Dean. I was actually laughing out loud going up the hill at having avoided the roadblock
I changed my lines and gears for parts of the track to use the grunt in the Eagle and started to chip away at my lap times, gradually gaining the confidence to push harder, and go faster. I caught Axel and promptly made a mistake to drop back again
. But I was able to close up again very quickly as I found even more pace. I was right back on Axel's tailpipes for the last lap, but there are very few real passing places on this track and there was no way to steal 2nd place.
I still had 6 galls of fuel at the end, so there was maybe a little more pace in the Eagle and I was surprised and pleased to see that I was within a few tenths of Tris' best lap.
Great fun chasing Axel ( and avoiding Dean!) .