Croft Race Report
Croft was our most local race on this year’s CGRC calendar and with sunshine forecast for the entire weekend, our spirits were high. Motorsport has a way of making you feel a full range of emotions, though, and this weekend was to be no different. We discovered that carefully reading regulations is important (oops), and sometimes what you think you know about suspension turns out not to be everything.
The problems start even before qualifying
Morning practice found a misfire — with cylinder two dropping out intermittently. After an engine failure earlier in the season, that’s not a noise anyone wanted to hear again.
We worked through it methodically. Plugs, HT leads, coil pack, injectors — swapped between cylinders, none of it the cause. Fuel was getting through fine, and we’d got a spark. So we borrowed a compression tester from another team in the paddock, braced for the worst, but got a clean reading across the board. With everything obvious ruled out, we removed the cylinder head to check the cams, on the theory that a lobe had broken. Still nothing. This, however, was going to come back to bite us later.
Twenty minutes to qualifying, and we were no closer to an answer. Then Carl — our workshop manager — went looking where nobody had yet thought to check: the wiring loom, where he found a damaged earth lead on the ECU, which was quickly replaced. Bingo! Misfire, be gone!
With all the time spent resolving the engine issue, we hadn’t had time to dial in the setup. Callum qualified ninth, seven-tenths of a second off pole. Given the morning, that was good enough.
A car that handles well would be nice
We stiffened the rear anti-roll bar before race one, chasing the same fix that had worked for a similar problem at Silverstone. It didn’t translate to Croft. The snappy oversteer we were trying to cure became oversteer everywhere, all the time — great fun, hopeless for races where you need a good corner exit for long straights! From a late bump to eighth on the grid for the start, we still finished fourth, more through a late incident ahead of us than our outright speed.
For race two, we reversed the setup theory entirely: stiffen the front, soften the rear. It transformed the car! Now we had grip. Starting from sixth position on the grid, Callum got a cracking launch up to third, latching onto the tow of the two leaders. The three cars pulled clear of the chasing pack by twelve seconds. That’s how we crossed the line, in third. But luck was on our side! The pole sitter was found to have jumped the start, which promoted us to second. But not for long…
This is where it turned out we’d failed to carefully read the regulations. We should have had a scrutineer present when we took the cylinder head off whilst diagnosing the misfire. Our remiss led to our disqualification from the race result. Hard lesson learnt.
If at first you don’t succeed, tweak the settings again
Croft had an interesting ‘feature race’ on the Sunday. Not points scoring, but a handicap race with both 150 and 135 class cars. Qualifying was set by taking everyone’s fastest lap times from race one on Saturday (with our terrible setup — a 1:31.9). The slowest car on the grid determined the total race time, and time penalties applied to every car based on their ability to do their fastest lap every lap. By the end of the race, no matter where you were on the road, everyone should have about the same total race time by the chequered flag. Yes, we know, confusing!
We decided to test a hypothesis with the setup of the rear, disconnecting the roll bar entirely to see if it would give us even more grip.
With our improved setup since qualifying anyway, we knew we’d be faster than the handicap suggested, so we had a simple plan: try to get onto the back of the fast leaders again. From sixth on the grid, we had another great start, climbing to fourth, then third one lap later.
By this point, the two leaders had already created a gap that was difficult to close. The softer rear end was giving us incredible traction, but it came at a cost — understeer. On reflection, it was faster, but required a slight change to Callum’s driving style. We had just about got onto the back of the two leaders before a missed gear at exactly the wrong moment cost us the valuable aerodynamic tow. Callum battled to reel them back in, but overheated the front tyres and the lap time fell away.
We eventually crossed the line 10 seconds behind the leader, but our pace difference from the day before and the handicap format meant we had won by just under 0.2 seconds! A fantastic result that lifted the team’s spirits after the disappointment of race two.
Competitive
We weren’t the fastest car at Croft. We found an intermittent fault the hard way, tweaked the setup twice before getting it right for the circuit, and lost a result we’d earned to a rule we should have known before we ever picked up a spanner. The disqualification came because being right about the car isn’t the same as being right by the rulebook — and it’s on us to know both.
Next stop: Cadwell Park on the 7th of August.
Live race replays
If you’d like to ‘sit in car’ for the three races, you can find the recordings here: