Donington Park
Not the best of weekends I'm afraid as we were struck by various technical maladies that caused us to qualify badly and to cause the first DNF of the season.

After enjoying testing a very nice Juno and the awesome Radical SR8 on Thursday I departed for a day out at the Bedford Autodrome on Friday where some friends and I enjoyed a day of driving heaven at Jonathon Palmers' unique facility.

Saturday started badly when I woke to find that a twinge in my back had worsened alarmingly resulting in my very helpful team members having to lift me out of the car.

In free practice the differential broke after two laps and during qualifying the handling was not what it should have been, then the chain snapped and we were outside of the top ten, oh dear.

The weather on Sunday was glorious and in race one we managed to get to fourth, helped mainly by the misfortune of others it has to be said as the car was still under steering too much to be competitive.

We had changed the car but cautiously as its a risky business changing anything between qualifying and the race, however it was not enough and I had to change my driving style to compensate for the problem and it was a lucky result.

Race two was the big one as my very nice sponsors from McCann Erickson had taken a hospitality suite and various other very important people including SBXL.com were present to see me race, in fact as I pulled away on the warm up lap I could see all of them waving, adorned as they were in matching team caps.

I was going to put on a good show, I thought as I lined up on the grid, cue the drama. Revving the 200bhp Suzuki engine to 7500 revs I watched in anticipation of the red lights extinguishing, at which point I dumped the clutch and moved not an inch.

We found out later that the sprocket had sheared off the gearbox which meant that every single part of the transmission had failed over the weekend. I trudged up to hospitality put a brave face on it and had a beer, very disappointed for those who had come to watch.

Never mind we will return with vengeance in three weeks time when we will definitely be getting back to the top step of the podium.

06 August 2007