For those of you who don't know, I'm currently still at college studying a Motorsport Engineering course at CEMAST. This means that my class is lucky enough to have a 750 Formula race car to learn and work on which our lecturer drives. The weekend just gone marked the second race of the 750 Motor Club Championship, and my first race with the college so I thought I'd write a little about how it went.
The track we were racing at was Mallory Park, roughly 3 hours away from the college and our driver hadn't driven the track in almost 4 years! However, this didn't stop us from getting up there (relatively) early and helping set up the car just before qualifying. So as we got the car into the assembly area, we decided to have a look at some of the other cars that were filtering through. The amount of variation in the 750 Formula cars is very impressive from different aero works to engine layouts etc, it means that no two cars are the same which provides for some interesting races. As the car went out for qualifying it was looking relatively slow at first due to the engine being too cold so the fuel was not vaporising properly in the engine to burn efficiently but as we got further into quali, the engine got warmer and we gained some more pace. We ended up running around 4 seconds behind pole with our class B car (the slower of the two groups) putting us in 10th out of 22 people which Tonin, our driver was very happy with. After the car came in, we took off the body panels to let it cool and got it prepped for race one at 1.45pm. We topped up the fuel and checked for any leaks etc and before long the car was back on the grid for our first race. Coming round to the end of the first lap, we were holding onto our 10th position but we did end up dropping a couple of positions-nothing we couldn't gain back though. We had a small amount of contact with another driver where he came off worse than us which was unfortunate as it meant we both lost time on the cars ahead. However, 2 laps before the end of the race, a water pipe burst throwing smoke everywhere which caused the car to become very slippery as the water was hitting the tyres. This means we had to take a DNF for the first race as Tonin pulled the car into the pits so we could get to work on fixing it up for race two.
Body panels came off again for us to find the broken pipe and, due to it's location, we had to remove almost the entire exhaust system to reach the pipe. We had two hours to get the problem sorted which was a good thing because as the cars were getting called to assembly, we were still fixing on body panels! Luckily we managed to get everything done and got the car to assembly before the race started. This time we watched the race start and we had a decent start but there was clearly an issue with the car as we dropped a lot of speed by the end of the first lap. Unfortunately the car was overheating so we had to take another DNF but this time it marked the end of our race day. It's a shame that so much did go wrong with the car but at the end of the day, that's what happens in racing. You never know just how your day is going to go!
But there were some drivers who had worse days than us, the number 69 car which was at race winning pace had to pull out of the first race as it had a faulty starter motor casing. This meant that the starter motor dropped down into the clutch making it explode and fly out of the car, narrowly avoiding the driver. While it's not great that his car suffered a lot of damage, the driver was okay which is more important!
At the same time, other drivers had good races, one of them being Olly Collett who has a full carbon bodied car. He took a podium in both races coming 3rd and 2nd but he sees room for improvement and may be able to snatch a first at the next round.
