The first two races of the 2008 MR2 racing series are with us at the home of British Motorsport Silverstone in Northamptonshire.

We traveled down at 9pm on the Saturday evening and arrived just gone 12pm, we managed to get into the paddock area, and rolled the car off the trailer and positioned both in spaces in the paddock ready for morning, that done we climbed into the back of the transit and got some sleep.

We were scheduled the first in for signing on at 7:30 am (this means declaring you are at the venue ready to race and showing your race license and club membership thus allowing you to race) and scrutineering of the car and your safety equipment such as suit and helmet at 8 am, so not a lot of time as scrutineering and signing on are at different ends of the paddock, they must be done in the above order as signing on gives you a scrutineering sheet for your car, this now all done we were ready for qualifying practice and quickly doing the tire pressures and fueling the car for the timed laps.

I had practiced at Silverstone at the meet and greet day back in march this year, unfortunately all that day the circuit was very wet……

so this means we had no information on tyre pressures as we didn’t try any different set-ups or make any changes to the car and suspension during the day apart from put the Toyo R888 tires on the car from the Yokohama`s we had it on.

So I managed to get myself in the first four cars out on the circuit for qualifying and so I got down to putting some good laps together, I soon found the car was under steering and progressively getting worse, realizing my problem I tried to do the best I could as you only get one chance to qualify and this was it! When the session had ended and we had seen the times taken by the circuit I had qualified 13th on the race grid out of 22 cars, Stuart and myself were very disappointed, we had expected to be in the first six , after my pace I showed earlier in the year at this circuit but now we needed to stop the under steer if we could.

For the first race Stuart tried some tire pressure changes to try and cure the cars under steering problems, so out on the grid and I managed to get another good race start and moved from my starting 13th on the grid up to 9th by the first corner, the car felt better at the beginning but started progressively under steering again but not to the degree we had before so something had been done right, but more work needed, I tried to push harder to catch the lead bunch but continued to fight the corners and lost control on brakes going into the Luffield complex , and this dropped me back down to 14th place, I then got my head down and drove a different tack and used my knowledge to make speed were I could and brake earlier to try and control the steering better, not ideal s I had to scrub off a lot more race speed than I would have liked into the corners making it harder to draft the cars out, but this I did and clawed my way back up to 11th place finish.

Back in the pits Stuart had a debrief with me and also watched my in-car video footage, he said the car is still not right so the next stop was tracking adjustments, we had set the car back to standard from last year as with last years tires “Falkens”, we all had severe issues so my car was set up along way from normal settings just to cope with those tyres at high speed funnily enough they under steered also but also were too soft and many other issues, thank goodness these were not like those.

So out for the second race, I again got a good start and was in 10th place by the end of lap one, I got involved in a good race with the two “Stoner racing cars”, and At the end of the race I finished in 8th place, I had really enjoyed the race and it seemed the under steering issue had been resolved, arriving back at the pits Stuart was pleased a great race he said, how was the car? “That’s my car back please don’t change a thing”, was my answer.

We went and got the race results and lap times, and I had knocked 3 seconds off my qualifying times and was running on the winners pace. It had been a great weekend weather wise and was good to see 22 MK1`s out racing for the first race meeting of this year.

With real regret for the first race meeting of the season also for the “NIPPON CHALLENGE”, I was unable to get my MK2 MR2 out to race due to part suppliers not following through, the car had not been run or tested and was not race ready, however it will be ready for the Rockingham race as this was my next planned event for it and a full days testing before hand at Cadwell park has already been booked, watch this space.