Testing at Mallory

Left home at the rather early hour of 5am on Wednesday morning, nice morning at home, and indeed until about 10 miles south of Mallory Park, where it started to drizzle ... I overclubbed the early departure, arriving at the circuit at 0715, unsurprisingly it was a bit quiet at that time, but at least it meant that I drove the 125 miles with very little traffic. On arrival I tried to doze off in the car, and was just getting there when some flash bloke arrives in by helicopter!

Wednesday mornings at Mallory is open testing, so anything can turn up, depending on whats there they run alternate 30 minute sessions for Closed Wheel and Single-Seaters. Real mixed bag of cars turned up, current BTCC Saloon, a pair of Ferrari 458 GTs (that'll be the bloke in the helicopter I reckon!), several Mazda MR2s, Mk2 Ford Escort, etc., then the single-seaters included a modern Formula Renault (Chris Middlehurst), some classic Formula Fords and a couple of Historic F1, a Lotus 18 being exercised by my old chum, Scotty Taylor from Oz, and a Cooper T45 being run by another Australian.

I was very excited to see my freshly restored car unloaded from the van, and looking splendid. We had to reset the seat belts and some stuff like that, plus refit the fire extinguisher. My first run was at 0930 ... by which time there was rain, only light, but persistent and a fully wet track ... not what I would have asked for. I ran about 10 laps quite gently, just checking it all out, keeping a good eye on the gauges etc., then brought it into the pits for Martin and Josh to give it a quick look over too. Then back out for a few more laps, a little quicker, except round the hairpin where a car had spun and stalled on the approach.

We needed to do a little more work to get me comfortable again, mainly moving the pedals and adjusting the belts (I'm a fair bit slimmer than when I was last in the car - seriously!).

Back out on track at 1030 again, but it's raining harder now, there is standing water in a lot of places, and a couple of rivers across the track; despite running at cautious speeds only I still had a lot of sliding around. After about 10-12 laps I decided that I wasn't really learning anything, and it was clear that the sun wasn't about to come out, so I brought the car in, and we called it a day, better than sticking it into the tyrewall.

It's a bit disappointing not to exercise it properly, especially considering the effort/cost to get up to Mallory - 250 mile round trip for me, 200 miles for the boys, all for less than 30 laps in the car! But we have achieved what we aimed to, which is to prove that it was all working, although we haven't really 'tested' it in anger running at these low speeds, low revs etc. It now goes back to Iain's workshop for a few other bits and pieces, and some brand new tyres, before heading out to the Nurburgring on Tuesday, I follow 24 hours later. We have some free practice available to us on the Thursday, so I plan to make use of that, hope it's dry ...

Thanks to Iain, Martin and Josh for all their hard work in restoring the car in this 6 week midseason break.