Class G Qualifying 1st | Class G Race 1st

Overall Qualifying 24th | Overall Race 17th

After our strong results at Rockingham, we were hopeful for another good result at Donington Park. The car had been on the dyno again in the week leading up to the race and we’d found yet more power – up to 12bhp in some areas of the rev range by varying the intake length.

Donington Park is however a very fast track, which is not really in the Mazda’s favour. We were on a shared grid with the New Millennium series bringing the total number of cars up to 36. And finally, the weather was dry which meant that the cars we’d been used to finishing ahead of at the start of the year would now be able to unlock their full power! Still, I had Rhys with me again this weekend and so we’d just have to go for it. Last time we raced at Donington was 2013, but within 3 laps of qualifying we were posting quick times. I’ve put together a split screen to show how similar both of our quick laps were. Great to have consistency between the two of us.

Qualifying 24th was a bit of a shock compared to what we had been used to, and we were both determined to make up positions during the race. Our best chance was during the pit stop and we didn’t want a repeat of our mistake at Rockingham where Rhys came into the pits way too early! Have a look at the highlights video below. Our pit stop was quick and this combined with some committed overtaking moves to get past cars which were clearly much faster in a straight line helped us to move from 24th to 17th overall. We claimed first in class too :)

When I uploaded my video I discovered another video from Kyle Ward in the Toyota Starlet. He was running a rear facing camera which captured some cool shots of the Mazda. The opening lap is shown below, and the extended full race version has some additional footage https://youtu.be/0zuvrnzUv4I?t=7m20s