Traditionally the UK championship starts with the first round at Sandy and the 2006 season was no exception. The Sandy track has evolved over recent years and is currently one of the best facilities in the UK in my opinion.
We had attended the warm-up meeting two weeks before, as had most of the key players. A good set-up was found at that meeting and I felt confident that we would be able to secure a good result.
Upon arriving at the track on Sunday morning we were greeted with blue sky's and sunshine, not at all what we had expected as during Saturday night it rained hard. Recently the Sandy club had installed under track drainage and it had done a wonderful job. Despite the rain the surface was hard and dry and with the sun out the track was in prime condition.
Round 1 of qualifying went well and I managed to finish the round in fourth position. I needed a little more on power rotation from the car, so we change the rear anti-squat from -2 to 0. Suspension wise the car felt great and had good turn in. The changes made worked and I set the fastest time for round 2, meaning the opportunity to TQ overall was on. I was happy with the car now so left everything the same. I managed another error free run and went fastest of all so far for round 3. As the remaining heats rolled by no one beat the time. TQ'ing two rounds gave us the overall TQ. We were delighted to achieve this at our first National meeting with the Xray.
After enjoying the nice weather for most of the day, dark clouds were moving in as the earlier finals were running. As the B final was finishing it started to rain and by the time the A final was about to start it looked like the rain was going to stay. A last minute decision was made to change to wet type tyres thinking that if the rain kept falling after 15 minutes the dirt tyres we were on would stop working.
As the flag dropped we lead the final around and continued to do so for the next few laps. The pace was fast at the front and after making an error I dropped to 5th position. We were struggling for forward motion from the wet tyres as the track surface was staying hard, but managed to keep in touch with the lead pack. Unfortunately for us the skies cleared a little and the rain stopped. This made our traction issue worse. Realising we had made a mistake I set about making the maxim of what we had. As the time rolled by I had got back into third position but was being pushed hard by Karl Jackson. We had a great race for the last 10 minutes of the final and in the end Karl got the better of me and took the final podium position. We gambled on tyres and made the wrong decision, after setting TQ is was a little disappointing not to have finished higher. The car performed awesomely all day. For the final we changed back to -2 anti-squat as we thought the rain would make the track less grippy. That change worked well.
Ironically for the last couple of minutes of the final it started raining again and this time did not stop! Nothing worse that packing up in the rain. The rain had arrived, but for us it was about 15 minutes off schedule.
Next round is at the Mold track, which is all grass. All of the Xray team are looking forward to racing there, I have had very little running on this sort of surface with the Xray, so it will be interesting to see how we fare.
