20th July 2001 - Cadwell Park

As I had to work between the Folly track day and the practice day I decided to travel up that morning and have a couple of session in the afternoon to get used to the track in the dry (hopefully) and take the opportunity of scrubbing in yet another set of tyres prior to the race weekend. Got up bright and early, packed the van and set off. Well, er, not quite - Somewhere along the line I assume that I had left the van lights on and managed to flatten the battery to the point where even the clock had stopped! Borrowed some rather feeble jump leads from a neighbour and tried to get it going using the battery in my car but it wasn't having any of it.

Finally resorted to phoning the AA who promised to be there within the hour. Got a phone call from them about fifty five minutes in to be told they had been held up and had called out a local garage who would sort me out. Another hour passed and the guy turned up in a huge tow truck - Not a problem for most situations but he was expecting to use his truck to jump start the van only nobody had told him that the underground garage where I keep the van has a rather low roof, i.e. about three inches over and above the height of the smallest Transit van I could find. After messing about for another hour we resorted to towing it with my car and bump started it that way.

It was lunch time by the time I got going and despite keeping my foot to the floor all the way to Lincolnshire it was gone half past three by the time I arrived. Dropped my wheels off with A & R Racing for a new set of rubber and proceeded to get signed on. Due to some earlier delays the timetable for the day was now completely shot and I was told we would only be able to have one session before they closed the circuit for the day. Bah Humbug!

Finished putting the dry wheels back on just as the session was called. Fortunately the weather was pretty good so all I had to worry about was how different the place looked in the dry and how quickly I could get up to speed ready for the race. For some reason my lap timer wasn't working so I had no idea how fast I was going, then again, judging by how quickly some of the SuperSport guys were coming by I obviously had a lot of work to do for the races on Saturday and Sunday. After a mere twenty minutes the session was red flagged due to an incident and that was it over for the day.

A very tiring and frustrating day that really didn't help much with my track knowledge although I should at least be thankful that I had managed to scrub in my tyres before the first race of the meeting!