Image copyright 2006 Neil Sutton, reproduced with his kind permission.

Sunday 20th August was an early start for Karen and Richard, and some of their friends to see them arrive at Silverstone in time for Richard to sign-on at Race Control. Once the formalities of signing on and scrutineering were out of the way, it was down to the business of applying all the sponsor decals on the car ready for the fun ahead.

The circuit was extemely wet, and unfortunately some vintage Bentley's had been out on it the previous day and had layed a generous amount of oil everywhere! Thus in the first practice session conditions were treacherous. On his first time through Copse, Richard span through 360 degress plus to end up more or less pointing in the desired direction but marooned in the middle of the track with a car that was reluctant to restart. Once away again, the rest of the session was spent wrestling the car through understeer and oversteer. Luckily, both car and driver survived and it turned out weren't last in the timings taken.

By the second session, the track was pretty much completely dry. This time there were no spins and only the slightest amounts of understeer or oversteer to worry about. Richard's main concern was allowing much faster cars past where possible. Now and again though things got a bit lairy, and in one incident his rear view mirror was full of a bright orange R32 GTR Skyline in a four wheel drift toward him at a rapid rate of knots! Times for the sessions showed that the speed differential had increased dramatically and sure enough he was now last.

The Time Attack itself was next... This consisted of an out lap, a timed flying lap, and a cool down lap. Richard used the out lap to try and gauge his lines and braking points as beast as he could given that previously faster cars had forced him off-line. During his Time Attack lap, he locked up under braking momentarily in Maggots but figured it didn't really cost him much. With the Time Attack lap completed, he still had to drive pretty hard to avoid baulking a following competitor who may have been much faster.

There was elation at completing the event and more good news when it was discovered his time had improved from the previous practice session. Karen was even more delighted, as her car had survived intact!

The final result had Richard finishing last. Full results of the day can be found here: