Race Report on the Britcar 500 for Hawthorns Motorsport

Not a report that I am over enthusiastic about writing as the event turned out to be something of a failure for us, still, one must take the good and the bad !!

The race weekend started on the Thursday with testing, continued on the Friday for more testing and two sets of qualifying, and then after spending most of Saturday waiting for the event to get going, we finally got underway by 1600hrs. Jan started with his usual flair and enthusiasm, but got a gentle tap in the rear and was punted off the track to in order to attend to some off duty lawn mowing. Typically for Jan, he didn’t let a small matter of dropping 20 odd places get him down and set about using his 55 min stint to claw his way back which he did and handed over to Rod with the car back in 17th place overall having seen the wrong side of 37th, a great run.

Rod maintained the position and improved we believe to 13th overall but more importantly we were now up to 2nd in class. At the end of Rod’s stint the car was handed over to Mark Coleing (Rocket Ron) Ronnie started well and was putting in some splendid lap times but after lap 6 or 7 he radioed in and said that he thought we may have developed a puncture. We had a visual on a drive by but could see no evidence of a problem so Ronnie continued, and attempted to drive around the issue whatever it was !! We didn’t have long to wait for Ronnie’s concentration was challenged and unfortunately, like many of us have done on countless occasions during a busy race, he missed a gear on a down change which resulted in a major over rev of the engine. This would have effected the clutch operation and caused serious vibrations throughout the car but to make matters worse a second missed down change then took the clutch out completely and Ronnie was pit bound.

We decided to see if we could change the clutch but as this would take about 2 hours, the best we could hope for was to put Jay out later in the race and do enough laps to obtain classification. When we started to investigate the tyre problem that started this whole series of unfortunate events, we found that the front left tyre was so badly grained it resembled a chunky tractor tyre rather then a race slick, we asked Dunlop to look at it and they said that they had not seen graining to this degree for as long as they could collectively remember, they added however that this was through no fault of the tyre but everything to do with the way the tyre had been used. Well, right or wrong, the tyre, for whatever the real reasons started the rot process, Ronnie did his best to cope with it but in the end mistakes were make and there for the grace of God go all of us !!

The situation was to get worse, for when we finally removed the old clutch, what we found was effectively a lump of metal and material that started life as a clutch but was now almost unrecognisable, furthermore, the sections of the clutch that had detached themselves from the original assembly had acted like a form of machine lath and had neatly trimmed away most of the clutch bell housing, what a bloody mess !!!

The Neil Garner Boys worked hard and fast and managed to get a new clutch installed and removed any sharp edges from the bell housing, the car was ready to return to the track but we were so far behind it was only worthwhile going out and doing just enough laps to classify. Neil Garner worked out what we needed to do and Jay went out and did what was necessary. Neil had warned us that the bell housing was not very safely mounted as the damage had made the securing bolts vulnerable but with slower lap times and a limited run, the risk was deemed acceptable.

We were classified as 8th in class and bagged 13 points towards our championship haul, we probably won’t need to use them as we will drop this round from our scoring system but that presupposes that we can do better then 8th in class in the final race of the Britcar season on the 7th November at Brands Hatch.

Will we be able to improve our position and place ourselves in with a chance of a class 3 win or dare we believe, even an overall GT win for back to back championships, you bet we can, or at least we can give it our best.