Turn 7 fly to double victory at Cadwell Park
Cadwell Park, often known as “the mini Nurburgring”, was the 5th round of [this year’s CGRC calendar][]. Once again, the British weather brought us wall to wall sunshine and some scorching temperatures. [this year’s CGRC calendar]: /racing/ Following our competitive but disappointing weekend at Croft, we came to Cadwell looking to get our setup into the right window straight away.
Qualifying was always going to be super important.
The circuit is notoriously tight and twisty, which makes overtaking very difficult. For this reason we opted to take part in Friday testing, running program of setup changes ensuring that the car was in the right window to qualify as far up the field as possible. In particular, we focused on setting the car up for the key traction zones which lead onto the two long straights. As three quarters of the circuit offer no opportunity for overtaking, being quick out of these two key corners was going to give us the opportunity to get racy when it mattered, even if it cost us a little time through the twisty bits.
We qualified in 4th position for race one with a time of 1:37.338, just over half a second away from a blistering pole lap by the #127 of Ian Howes. The grid for race two was determined by everyone’s second fastest laps, which for us was a 1:37.554 and good enough for third.
Getting it off the line
Starts are a key part of motor racing. It offers the only opportunity during the race that you can have a large speed offset against all your competitors. Reacting to the lights is a key part, but getting the starting rev’s and clutch engagement right is the real secret. Not enough revs and you can bog down, too many and/or dropping the clutch too quickly and you can spin the rear wheels.
Lining up on the second row of the grid, the second placed car of Ben Winrow starting directly ahead of us had a poor get away, giving us the opportunity to use the extra bit of space offered by the pit exit to nip by. Keeping it pinned, we managed to swoop around the outside of the pole sitter Howes into turn one and take the lead.
From here on, it was 20 minutes of defence.
The aerodynamic qualities of a Caterham (or total lack of) mean that the slipstream affect of a another Seven ahead of you is enormous. This is where our focus on those key corner exits came to bare fruit. Getting clean, fast exits gave us the crucial gap we needed going onto the straights to be able to defend into the braking zones. However, with just 5 minutes to go, Howes got a really good run on us going onto the long back straight. Covering the inside of the road, Howes went left going into the braking zone and we touched. The contact was minimal, but it saw Howes fall off the road and slip down to 4th, before making an amazing recovery drive to retake 2nd. Crucially this gave us the space to look after the tyres and hold on for the race win, but later the stewards decided that this incident was caused by overly aggressive defending on our part, and issued us with 5 place grid penalty for race 2.
Getting racy from 8th
Sunday morning saw temperatures climb even higher, and today’s race was 5 minutes longer than race 1. This was going to make tyre management even more crucial. All weekend, there were 4 of us who seemed to have the edge on the rest of the pack. Our focus for the start of the race was to try and get ourselves back up to 4th as quickly as possible, and then see if we could still get onto the back of the leaders. After some intense dicing, we made it up to 4th by the end of lap 4, and fortunately the leaders were just about in range. This lead to 15 minutes of great racing between the four of us and once again, our setup gave us the edge to be able to attack onto the straights, and defend once we’d made it to the front.
Ultimately, despite our grid penalty, we took two wins from two, rounding out a solid weekends racing from Cadwell.
The BRSCC had live coverage throughout the weekend, and our full length race replays with commentary can be found below.
Race 1
Race 2
An enormous thanks to our sponsors, who showed up in force for us once again this weekend.
Pauls Body & Paint did a tremendous job preparing our second, identical 310R Race Car, which will now be available for race weekend and trackday hire alongside our main car.
Moin Moin Bakery who came along with some delicious Carrot Cake.
The Den, who also came along to show their support
And of course Team Schemes, Uberniche and Home Time Movers
Next Stop: Dijon-Prenois Circuit, France, 12th September