Round 3 - Donington Race Report - May 2023
Friday free practise went really well, our new race engineer I had done some good changes to the setup of the car first to start with and as the day went on we was able to dial the car in and fine tune it's performance ready for qualifying on Saturday.
In Saturday’s free practise we were both setting really good times on 100 plus kilometre old tyres so it was really buoyant for qualifying. In qualifying on brand new tyre’s the car felt absolutely amazing and I was able to put us P1 in class and that's where we stayed right up until 30 seconds before the end of qualifying and we was just beat by less than 1/10 of a second which dropped us into P2 for qualifying. this was fantastic for us and put it in good stead for the race on Sunday.
Kavi started the race from P2 in class and soon came under pressure from one of the BMW's, with the BMW enjoying a straightline speed advantage on our Artura, Kavi fell behind it on the straight but was crawling all over it through sector one in an effort to get the place back. He went for a move on the hairpin, only for the BMW to squeeze across. The resulting contact damaged the front of our car and also damaged the steering knocking it way out. The massive loss of aero from the damage to the front splitter and other and side finn’s along with the cars steering now being out made the race a uphill battle from that point onwards, this was also then compounded by Kavi getting a drive through penalty for track limits. I jumped in the car at the half way point and the car was horrendous to drive the steering wheel was at 10 to 4 to go in a straight line, under breaking it pulled massively to the left but once I got my head around the issue’s I was able to push on and set some half decent lap times with the car like a wounded animal. At the chequered flag I had managed to bring the damaged car home in P5 in class and P8 overall, bagging some points for the team which we did not think was possible with the amount of damage to the car.
Overall it’s been a tough weekend but there are lots of positives to take away. We felt we had a really strong car on Saturday, one that we could really fight with and we were well in the hunt for a class pole position. Kavi got unlucky at the start of the race with the contact and when I got in for the second stint the car was all over the place and it was a matter of trying to go quick but also nursing it home to get some points. I am really pleased we have moved forward with the cars pace and hopefully we can come out fighting at the next round at Snetterton.
The next round is at Snetterton on 17th/18th June.
With thanks to Jakob Ebrey Photography for the imagery.
Please click on the below link for some pictures from the weekend and you can use any of the attached photos for your own marketing etc, the pictures are from Jakob Ebrey Photography, so please just credit them to him. The file will expire normally after 7 days so please download them so you have them for future use.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EXVmwi07n6jG3VmpDmozwnUoYdPZUi_6?usp=share_link
