Sprinting at North Weald

We normally do at least one sprint at North Weald a year, but the car we use varies. For this event it was the MGZR, which was somewhat feisty and rather tail happy!

I was a couple of seconds off the pace in practice, but sitting comfortably mid class. There were four timed runs, and I consistently improved, still sitting mid class but a little off Matt. I went out for my final timed run and improved my 1.02 seconds (my greatest improvement of the day) but it wasn’t quite enough – I finished 0.05 seconds (five hundredths) behind Matt – agonisingly close!

We finished 4th and 5th in class (out of 10), both beaten by an S2000, Fiesta ST and an Integra.

A comparison of mine and Matt’s best runs can be seen here. Whilst my best time came on my final run, Matt’s was on timed run two (out of four); he was red flagged halfway through his initial second timed run due to a broken down car on the course and so had a re-run. Even he said if he hadn’t had that re-run, who knows what the result could have been!

Photos by Nick Cook.

Advertisement

Running a walkabout

Having won the South Oxon Car Club walkabout / treasure hunt in 2021, it meant it was down to us to organise the 2022 event.

We decided to run it in Bicester, as it was easy for us to get to and hopefully accessible for fellow club members. We needed to be able to get there easily on week nights to plan the event, and with a quiet high street and free parking we thought it would work well. It only took one evening in Bicester to plan which was a bonus, having set aside a couple of evenings to go there.

We set 50 questions of varying levels of difficulty, and Matt checked them quickly on the night before we started. The answers were all on signs, shop windows, drain covers or higher up and all bar one question worked, so the scores were out of 49. Instead of setting tie break questions, we said the tie break would be who completed it the quickest if teams tied on number of points.

Six crews turned out with the winning score being 48 out of 49. Matt had told me some of my questions were too hard and I was a little apprehensive seeing people taking time for the first few answers, but it worked!

Example – who do you ask about medicines? Kay!

British Grand Prix 2022

In 2021, I was asked to run the P2 marshal welfare team for the British Grand Prix and in 2022, I was asked back to look after the marshal welfare team again. With Covid-19 rules changing, there was no longer P1 and P2 teams and we were one big team instead, made up of 13 people.

As in 2021, it wasn’t without challenges but with the ethos “a picture tells a thousand words,” here are a few images from the weekend. It doesn’t show the late nights, hard work and so on which went into the event, but perhaps gives some slightly different views.