Assuming rather than thinking

I arrived at Oulton not expecting to do well. It is a difficult circuit, as acknowledged by all, and I had decided that my crash had taken up the money I might have spent on testing. So the mindset was: do your best but expect to perform midfield.

So when this is what happened I was not surprised and assumed it was my crap driving. In qualifying I really struggled to overtake anyone and found it all a challenge. I could not seem to find any consistency and was all over the shop. Because of the aforementioned mindset I just thought it was down to me and did not try to analyse whether anything else was going on.

I ought to mention a couple of corners. Cascades is a (kind of) flat out corner before a hairpin but flat out was not possible for me and I had real trouble braking for the hairpin. This is downhill and bumpy and to be honest, bloody frightening. Druids is a fourth gear corner with only limited run-off and one where you miss the first apex and try to hit the second. Once again I was over braking (this is a bit of a clue) and not coming out fast enough. These are examples of my overall performance but they are the two most difficult parts of the circuit.

The race followed a similar pattern except people were constantly trying to get past me. Apart from us all trying to miss Simon Davey’s nosecone at the start, my race consisted of trying to keep people behind and (literally) not crash at every corner. I (still) thought I was driving really badly and kept making mistakes. Now for anyone who reads this site you may find mention of mistakes not unusual but please trust me here, it was a complete shambles. It was no fun at all and when Rory Farrell, a very quick Irishman, and the evergreen and vastly experienced Dave Lowe got past me after yet more errors I could not even get that excited. I had overtaken some people during the race, although God knows how, so 10th was a more than fair result from 11th on the grid.

BUT THEN I REALISED. What had actually been happening was that I had a long and soft brake pedal and instead of there being one centimetre between the brake starting to bite and locking up it felt more like 5 centimetres (1/4” and 2” for non-metrics). I will never say that I am a great race driver but I know that without this issue some of the consistency could have returned, and possibly even a little more confidence. It may have also helped me to stop missing gears and apexes.

Now this tells me a number of things. Firstly I must not always assume I am a tosser and arriving feeling a certain lack of confidence is unproductive. Secondly, analyse the performance of the car and see if things can be improved after practice. Thirdly – try and use the brain when out there. I find it almost impossible to believe that none of this became clear until the race was virtually over. It would have then been too late but being aware that it may be the car not me, that things do go wrong with it AND that if you can work it out in practice you might be able to fix it for the race may just allow me to do a little better. Finally of course it now seems that a little investment in testing could have made all the difference.

During the night I woke up and could still feel the pedal travelling a long way and never being sure when the car was going to stop. It all seems so obvious and could have probably been fixed by a judicious bit of bleeding.

We have a bit of a break now until Snetterton – 5/6 August – so I am going to enjoy 2 weeks of Provence and all the delights France has to offer.