Rounds 9 and 10 – Pembrey
23rd September 2007
5th place for Joe
Pembrey circuit in South Wales was the location for rounds 9 and 10 of the 2007 Playstation Ginetta Juniors race championship.
Schoolboy Joe arrived at the circuit late Friday evening so was unable to take advantage of the test session earlier in the day. The first time out on the track in his Ginetta G20 GT4 would be the free practice session the next morning.
Saturday dawned cold, misty and very damp so track conditions would be slippery and Joe would have to learn the way around in far from ideal conditions but posted an impressive 8th fastest of the 21 car field.
The qualifying session in the afternoon was warm and dry so a revised car setup that we had no opportunity to test held him back to 16th fastest, 2.36 seconds off pole and 1.5 seconds off 3rd. Very impressive given his lack of experience.
Saturday evening was spent making offerings to the Welsh rain gods who must have heard our prayers as Sunday morning was pretty awful with gusty winds and plenty of showers. To make matters worse our portable shelter was trying to be more portable than it was designed for and although lashed down was bending in the middle. The Ginetta G20 GT4 is an enclosed car and I was desperate to keep both the inside of the car and Joe as dry as possible to stop the inevitable misting problems he would have if things got too wet. Needless to say lessons learned at Anglesey meant we will never go to Wales without a gallon of RainX.
Race One
Starting from 16th Joe took it easy on the damp track for the first couple of laps but still made up places and then started to push on. Unfortunately he pushed a little too hard on the entry to Hatchets Hairpin and had an off making contact with another car. Fortunately the damage was light and both cars were able to continue. This dropped him back down again but he battled back up and was 11th at the finish. If we could have moved the line he would have been 10th! Joe was upset with the mistake and apologised to the other driver.
We had taken Joe’s car to Norfolk based TJ Motor Sport the previous weekend who had gone over the car for us. We have come to Ginetta Junior from the Historic Clubmans rally world where car setup means making sure there is a wheel at each corner, so TJ’s input was invaluable. “The car was so much more predictable and I could make it do what I wanted rather than just having to react to what it was doing” said Joe.
Race Two
Even wetter and first corner carnage was inevitable! Fortunately 17 of the 19 race starters got through and Joe set about improving his 15th place grid position. “It was slippery like ice out there but I was amazed how little speed people were carrying through Brooklands hairpin. I found I could take a completely different line through there and by sacrificing a perfect exit I could carry loads of speed in and pass cars virtually every lap” said Joe.
Joe was rapidly up to 12th then 10th, 8th and with a couple of laps of the 15 minute race remaining came past me on the pit wall in 5th! Although coming under pressure from the 6th place car Joe kept it together and the chasing car spun trying to close the gap giving Joe a cushion for the last lap. “I saw the car gradually gaining and then all of a sudden he was gone so I eased off a bit on the last lap” Joe didn’t realise how close he was getting to 3rd and 4th who were battling hard and slowing themselves up and Joe came through the Honda curve for the last time a mere 2.1 sec behind 4th and 2.6 sec behind 3rd. “That was so much fun” said Joe “The car was sliding everywhere particularly through Spitfires, but I could control it really easily with the throttle. It was so much better than previously in the wet. Massive thanks to TJ for getting it sorted”.
I had shouted myself horse on the pit wall and I am so proud of the lad. He hasn’t Karted, and this weekend were only his 9th and 10th Races ever. The rain is a real leveller as far as car performance is concerned. In a one make series it’s supposed to be a level playing field, but with the majority of cars run by professional teams who regularly test and coach their drivers, 15th to 5th in the rain is a demonstration of real talent in my book!
Rounds 7 and 8 – Croft
26th August 2007
Nobody said it would be easy!
Another mixed weekend for Joe. We set off in what we thought was plenty of time on Friday morning for Croft only to find yet again that the first 15 miles was to take us an hour and a half! instead of 20 mins. The British road system is so incredibly pants at times. If only Dr Beeching hadn't torn up all the railway lines those years ago, we could do with them now to get half the traffic off the roads. We literally couldn't get out of London.
Rounds 5 and 6 – Donnington Park
5th August 2007
Further progress but problems too.
Donnington park 4/5 August - Joe makes Good progress but not without problems AND Whizzo too!
Race 1 Good, Joe started 16, got up to 13th was challenging for 12th when incident up ahead forced him to have to brake very hard, car jumped out of gear loosing him momentum. Was chasing back when had spin dropping him to 15th where he finished.
Race 2 started 16th, 2nd lap car spun in front of him in Craner curves, he had to take to the grass to avoid, returning to track just after old hairpin and loosing loads of time. He battled back up to 13th going quicker each lap getting cheers from the IDL boys on pit wall as he made his passes through Redgate!!! but on lap 8 got his foot stuck on loud pedal instead of brake whilst heel-toe for Redgate as pushing hard and catching 12th place. So DNF, but winner set fastest Lap of race 1min 30.289, Joe fastest lap 1m 33.126 gap of only 2.837 seconds. Excellent progress considering winner and several others had been practicing at donnington all day Thursday! Joe's third race meeting EVER!
He had a Cheshire cat grin when he finally got dug out of the sandpit!
We had the great privilege to meet and chat with Barrie "Whizzo" Williams. Barrie was a founding father of the Under-17 Car Club, with whom Joe has learned to drive.
Rounds 3 and 4 – Silverstone National Circuit
22nd July 2007
The week leading up to Silverstone saw some of the heaviest rainfall the UK has ever experienced deposit itself on central and southern England. Joe was booked for a 40 minute test/practice session on the Silverstone National circuit on the Friday evening but with major road closures due to heavy flooding and the fact that large parts of Silverstone were actually under water, this test was cancelled. Sadly this robbed Joe of some much needed seat time as he is still very much learning to handle his Ginetta G20 GT4 coupe.
Saturday morning dawned cloudy, cool and wet, but at least the actual rain was relatively patchy and light. First look at the track revealed quite a lot of standing water, so was this to be Anglesey all over again, should SPEED MERCHANTS trade in the car for a speedboat? This weekend there was to be a 20 minute free practice session that would allow the kids to get to grips with the conditions. We were suitably stocked up with RainX so there would be no repeat of the window misting problems of before and many of the remaining apertures that might let in water had also been blanked off.
A much softer setup on the car was employed and Joe, perhaps a bit cautious in the bad conditions posted 12th fastest lap time of the 15 drivers who ventured out onto the slippery track. The conditions for the later qualifying session were slightly worse and although Joe matched his practice time, he would line up 14th of 18 on the start grid for Race 1 on Sunday but much closer to the leaders time wise compared to Anglesey.
Unlike Anglesey we had the luxury of a pit garage that only 2 weeks previously had housed one of the F1 Teams at the British Grand Prix! Unfortunately the only souvenir they had left was a big pile of redundant network data cabling. Bit naughty of them not tidying up properly!
As Joe had kept the car very much on the island (a couple of spins but nothing way off track) there wasn’t anything like the work to do on the car, so we were able to relax. A few of the other teams had brought televisions so we were able to watch the European Grand Prix qualifying and witness young Lewis Hamilton’s alarming high speed crash. Not good! We then had a wander and watched some of the qualifying and later in the day some races of the other championships attending the weekend. As is so typical, almost as soon as the Playstation Ginetta Junior qualifying has finished, the weather started to improve! However during the afternoon it worsened again, in fact it become so windy wet and cold we could see our breath in front of us as we sat huddled in the stands. THIS WAS 21ST JULY……
Joe’s cousin Dan Shaw had arrived mid morning to help us over the weekend and I can’t begin to tell you what difference the extra pair of hands made. At Anglesey I had be alone on the tools with an EasyUp Shelter borrowed from Ben Elliott (massive thanks go there as without it we wouldn’t have survived) that was turned by the very windy conditions into a 5M x 2.5M Kite! In fact by the end of the weekend it had become bent! Sorry about that Ben. With Dan’s help we had the car fettled and headed into Towcester for a Fish and Chip supper and a few well earned pints of ale (lemonade for Joe.)
Sunday morning. Amazingly the sky was blue and there was a massive ball of fire visible in the east, I seem to remember seeing this sort of thing before,… Anyway did this mean Joe would get to race in the dry? This would be a first. After a quick breakfast it was into the garage to re-set the car for dry conditions, all still very much guess work for our fledgling team, but the steepness of the learning curve is reducing little by little. As Race 1 wasn’t until midday we had plenty of time to catch up on the latest news from the other teams and generally chill out a bit. Some of the cars had been involved in damaging incidents in both practice and qualifying and the teams had successfully carried out some quite major repairs, so it would a full grid of 18 cars that would take the start.
Just after breakfast Roy “Royston” Massey arrived mounted on his 1400cc Yamaha motor cycle and almost immediately you could see the eyes of the Legends Race Teams setup opposite to where he parked it literally light up. One bloke wandered over and suggested to him that he “might like to hide it” so in order to remove temptation it was whisked away to the back of the pit garage.
Roy has “spannered” for race teams in the past so is a great asset for us, but when he started asking intelligent questions about the car and the setup and corner weights etc, I had to confess to not knowing what he was on about. However you can bet that I am in the process of getting to grips with all this new terminology and its application. Next time out we should have a better balanced car that is much closer to the minimum weight limits for Joe to compete with.
As the time for Race 1 approached the sun still shone and the track was definitely dry so the lap times would be much reduced from the previous day. The problem for Joe was that he hadn’t driven the car in the dry since April and had no idea of the levels of grip there would now be. Consequently he started a bit slow and lost ground early on dropping two places to 16th where he would ultimately finish. “I was thrashing the car but couldn’t keep up” stated Joe post race. I observed that he might have still been using the same gears for corners in the dry as he had been in the wet and this was costing him time. He was certainly flying into Copse corner with a text book heel and toe down shift to 3rd, but the leaders were taking the corner still in 4th! Never mind it was his third ever motor race so still learning. His dry race time was 13 seconds quicker than his wet qualifying, on a par with most of the other drivers. Another race another finish, not last and yet more championship points with the chance for more in Race 2.
We did nothing to the car setup between races as Joe said the car was nice and neutral so a quick wipe over with the oily rag and a check that nothing had come loose and it was time for lunch. The family had come out in some force to watch Joe (something he wasn’t too keen on) and had brought with them a massive picnic lunch, loads of cheese sandwiches, pork pies and lashings of Ginger Beer (Valerie, I was only joking) but needless to say it all went down very well and we had time to sit back and watch an incredibly eventful F1 Grand Prix from Germany.
Rather annoyingly Joe’s second race of the day was to be the penultimate so no early start home for us, but at least we had no pressure to get the car ready. I have noticed that while Joe remains incredibly calm before a race I am actually rather keyed up and anxious. I am basically strapping my youngest into a potentially lethal machine and sending him off to do battle (bit dramatic I know) so I suppose it’s natural. I also get an incredible feeling of pride, tinged with jealousy, when I hear his name over the tannoy as he lines up on the grid.
So onto Race 2, Joe was to start in 13th as is second fastest lap from the Saturday qualifying sets the grid for the second race. One thing about Joe is that his times, while still being a bit off the pace of the leaders are incredibly consistent so for this reason he moved up a place. Another bad start (race starts are daunting at the best of times,) so places lost again but this time recovered so a 13th place finish, not last and a few more championship points. Joe was definitely going faster than race 1, improving his lap time by 2 seconds over the morning race. As a comparison the first 8 cars all ran marginally slower than their morning race times, so Joe is definitely closing the gap. Well done Joe and remember the team motto “More Throttle Less Brake”
Joe Shaw race debut – Anglesey Circuit
30th June/1st July 2007
Joe Shaw and 14 other Playstation Ginetta Junior drivers made the trip to the all new Anglesey Circuit this weekend for the first round of the championships. The format was for two 15 minute races on two different circuits. The Coastal Circuit on the Saturday and the International GP Circuit on Sunday with a 15 minute timed practice session for each to set the grid positions.
We arrived early Saturday morning in the midst of a gale driven rainstorm that persisted in varying degrees most of the day. The other competitors had been there since Thursday or Friday testing and learning the circuits, so for us to turn up on spec was never going to allow Joe to set the world on fire, but you have to start somewhere.
The Saturday 15 minute practice took place in very difficult conditions with a lot of standing water and wind driven rain. Unfortunately although I thought I had done a good job of keeping the water out of Joe's car it quickly filled, the windows misted up and Joe could only manage 4 laps before returning to the pits. "I couldn't see the apexes or even the edges of the track" said Joe. I sent him back out to do his best feeling extremely guilty about not preparing properly but the session ended before he could post any decent times. He would line up 15th and last on the grid.
I spent the next couple of hours drying out the car, applying gallons of anti-fog to the see through bits and modifying my fresh air ducting to actually blow a decent amount of air at the windscreen.
Come the actual race the rain had reduced but the track was still awash. Joe made a good start making up two or three places off the line but it wasn't too long before he was back down the order loosing places after a nice synchronised spin with another competitor at the tricky fast Church bend. "I took a wider line as had a slight overlap with another car, there was no contact but we spun at the same moment" Both cars rejoined and continued without stopping. Within a couple of laps, 3 or 4 more cars had gone off at the same place so no disgrace for Joe!
Joe just stuck to it and as the battles up ahead resulted in more excursions onto the green stuff (actually mostly still brown as the grass hadn't yet grown) Joe again found himself back up the order and although eventually loosing out to some of the recovering quicker drivers, he finished a in worthy 12th place. Well done Joe I couldn't have asked for more given it was his first ever competitive race, and I do mean first ever! No years of karting experience here.
"I feel a lot happier about things now" said Joe "The windows stayed clear and I could actually see the track! I know I can brake a lot later and push harder but I wanted to just make sure I got the finish on a circuit I simply didn't know. The car was under-steering a lot in the slow corners and the back end was very twitchy in the fast open bends".
Clearly yours truly has a lot to learn about setup and I had still had the car far too stiff for the wet.
Part one done. Joe brought the car back in one piece, if a little covered in mud inside and out, so before packing up for the day it was buckets and sponges out for the big clean up and oh yes the sun finally came out!
Sunday morning dawned wet again but soon the sun appeared and gave us all hope for a much better days racing. How cruel then that by the time practice started it was wet again. Today's race was to be on the International GP circuit that was largely an extension of the coastal track so not too many new corners to learn but I hoped a softer setup might help. Joe again qualified at the back but I was pleased to here that the handling was a lot more neutral.
The sun decided to show itself again not long after the session ended! Could it be that we might actually get to do some dry racing! Well almost. When the call came to go the assembly area the skies had darkened again and nobody wanted to leave the paddock as it looked as though a last minute change of settings might be required.
We flipped a coin and decided to stay with the softer wet option and trundled off to the assembly area. At first we felt quite lonely down there but eventually the rest of the field showed up as rain began to fall again. Just as the cars were about to be sent out to form up on the grid the wind veered and the rain abated. I could only now hope that the track remained wet and didn't dry so much Joe's setup would hamper him again. Curses, too stiff for the first race now possibly too soft for the second!
The race start wasn't a good one for Joe and he joined at the back of the field where he plugged away still learning and improving his lap times in stages. Once again the mid-field were really battling hard and there were one or two incidents that dropped people back. This time there were no retirements and Joe finished in 14th out of 15 finishers. "I found I could make up time on some parts of the track but was loosing out in other areas, but I learned a lot and can’t wait for Silverstone, a circuit I actually have driven before".
Well done Joe, I am very proud of you. Two starts, two finishes, not last or lapped. Not a bad debut for somebody who has never raced before, talk about jumping in at the deep end, oh and yes championship points to boot!
Anglesey is a fantastic track and apart from the rain made for a good weekends racing. There were great battles throughout and some excellent performances. The rest of the season looks like it will be a thriller.
Congratulations to all who made the trip.
Malcolm Shaw
30th May 2007
OULTON PARK TEST DAY
Oulton test day went well with the new stiffer sidewall tyres. Joe was much later on the brakes and getting peak revs in all the gears. He did really well as it was pretty slippery and he was sharing the (open pitlane) track day with Lotus's, Caterham's, Westfield's, some ferociously tuned Subaru's and Mitsubishi EVO's, Ferrari F360 Challenge and GT3 Porsche race cars plus a host of other cars of every conceivable type apart from open wheelers. It was quite nice that a few people came up and said how quick our little Ginetta was!
We discovered that there isn't enough fresh air getting into the cockpit for the driver, so I have spent today fitting a cold air feed from the front of the car using a combination of flexible 100MM dia aluminium cooker hood hose and 32MM plastic vacuum cleaner pipe. This will provide face level fresh air and help de-mist the screen if damp. Next job was to seal the lower rear cockpit area (rain spray was coming in around the Rollcage apertures) and cut some outlets in the rear roof pillars to let all the extra (hopefully) fresh air out.
I have also now modified the front wheel uprights so that the new pattern brake pads that we have had forced upon us now actually fit!
We hope to be able to do another test at the old RAF Aclonbury airbase near Huntingdon on the 17th June. Joe will be able to use the wide open spaces of the runway there to really throw the car about and get used to how it behaves on the limit and beyond without the worry of hitting anything. After that it’s the first race weekend at the totally re-built Anglesey Race circuit, yet another steep learning curve!
12th April 2007
BRANDS HATCH TEST DAY
We decided to give the non-championship Spring Cup Meeting at Pembrey a miss this coming weekend (we did go to observe though) preferring to keep our powder dry for the full season opener at Anglesey at the end of June. We did however pop down to our local at Brands on Thursday 12th for a spot of testing. Our very own "Stig" Ben Elliott was on hand to check the setup of the car and to give Joe some tuition, so we had quite a full day.
Joe's first solo flying lap for the Indy circuit was in the 1 min 5 sec bracket but very quickly he was into the 1 min 2s, the best about 1 min 2.8 this being just over 2 sec outside the Ginetta Junior lap record but not bad for his first effort. In the next session Ben was onboard and was working on trail braking as late as possible and was coaching Joe on getting the best out of the 88BHP available from the 1400 Ford Fiesta engine, the torque and power curves of which are a rather strange by all accounts! With Ben's added ballast (= + 2 sec a lap) Joe was lapping at down to 1 min 4, so another 0.8 nearer the record. Ben says Joe has more to go yet, so given the seat time he has had to date that really only amounts to 3 hours in total I am so proud of his form thus far. That’s my Boy!
29th March 2007
Race Retro fundraising for TEENAGE CANCER TRUST
Thanks to Mr Ian Williamson and his team for accommodating us at the Race Retro International Historic Motor Sports show on Sunday 25th March.
We met loads of wonderful people who donated and our two little collecting tins were getting quite heavy by the end of the day. Once the TCT had counted it, along with a couple of after the event donations, it all added up to £300. Next year we will take some large buckets! Lol
24th March 2007
Joe passes ARDS test with straight A's
Thanks to Everyman at Mallory Park for an enjoyable day, oh and for passing Joe with flying colours.
12th March 2007
Increased Television coverage for Great & British Festivals in 2007
Dunlop Tyres announced a new
television package for the upcoming 2007 Dunlop Great & British
Festivals with greater coverage on Sky Sports and Motors TV.
At least six of the eight Dunlop Great & British Motorsport
Festivals will be shown on Sky Sports reaching over 8 million homes
in the UK and Ireland. Sky Sports will feature 90-minute highlights
from each racing event and all the best action from some of the UK's
biggest championships, the Mini Challenge, the Radical Biduro
Championships, the Radical Enduro Championships and the
Playstation2 Ginetta Junior Championships, plus the new for 2007
BARC/Dunlop Sport Maxx Cup.
Motors TV is to dedicate a half-hour show at each championship round
and will broadcast to over 15 million homes across Europe. In
addition, coverage from the Dunlop Great & British Festivals will be
shown on networks worldwide.
1st March 2007
SOLICITORS ON TRACK
NEW PARTNER JOINS SPEEDMERCHANTS TEAM
We are delighted to announce the addition of Foskett Marr Gadsby & Head Solicitors to our growing band of supporters. Their help will be invaluable and we look forwards to working with them throughout the season.
