For the first race, I would start 14th, as I had a three place grid penalty to carry over from my last weekend at Rockingham. I was confident I could made up positions though as my pace was quicker anyway. I also had some of my family down, so I wanted to perform well for them.
The first race of the weekend went well, with myself holding positon and battling with Marcus Bailey, Seb Fisher and Scott Leach. For the second race though, I made a mistake early on after initially making a good start and making it to the front of the second pack. However, I ran over the curb coming out of Old Hairpin, which upset the car. This was strange as I had been doing it all weekend with no issue. This pitched the car into a slide, I held the slide but this meant I slid across the exit curb, along it to the end and then bottomed out on the ditch at the end…. and snapped my exhaust. For the rest of the race, my car was quite loud! This dropped me back a bit, but I only lost one position. I was however down on power quite considerably due to a loss of back pressure. For the rest of the race I just focused on maintaining position and doing what I could with what I knew was wounded car. I remained in the battle with Marcus Bailey, Adam Craig and others. It got to the point where we were heading three wide into The Esses chicane, I was on the outside. Because of this I missed my braking point. I was too focused on the others. I still tried to make the chicane, missing the first apex curb massively, as I was on the outside anyway. I ended up on the inside of the next curb, the other side of the sausage curb, with quite an amount of opposite lock. I tried to save it but it ended up being quite a tank slapper and I ended up sliding back and forth across the track, I got it back under control however and pushed on, knowing I’d lost four positions, or what felt like more at the time.
I took on what I’d learnt from previous races, and what Jack Sycamore had taught me. To carry on to the end without letting my performance get to me, so it didn’t affect my driving. I ended the race holding off Seb Fisher. We were almost side by side on the finish line, with me just ahead.
