Unfortunately the car is not quite finished yet as the doors require another coat of paint, so this is a bit of a preview until the weather warms up and I can finish spraying the doors and get all the stickers fitted. I’ll update this page with better photos as soon as possible. However, for now I would recomend you to get in touch with Hitprint via their website in order to take advantage of some great quality work for very competitive prices. Tell them I sent you!

The point of the day was to have a bit of fun to end the year. I fitted a passenger seat in order to take passengers round with me and also to sit alongside Dad and give him some pointers on how to get speed out of the car. It also gave me an opportunity to feel the effect of the changes I had made and I can confidently say it’s a huge improvement! Cosmetically, the car has had the interior tidied up with carbon fibre, a re-spray to remove the horrible bobbly paint and a freshly painted white roll cage and door mirrors. Mechanically, the suspension has been serviced and bought up to spec, wiring loom completely stripped to minimums, suspension bushes have been replaced again, and finally a full alignment including ride height. I’m not prepared to give more details for obvious reasons!

The car handles very very well, it’s extremely predictable and the changes to the setup that I made since the last round of the championship have removed it’s bad traits – which were mainly understeer and twitchiness under braking. It still needs fine tuning as the suspension is much firmer since it was serviced and the corner weights have not been set.

As hinted at earlier, the purpose of the day was to take passengers out and show what it’s like at full race speed. For me, it was brilliant, everybody got the full experience and there was no “taking it easy”. This meant that there was a mixed reaction to being a passenger alongside me! In a straight line the Mazda is not fast, we still got to 115mph at the end of the straight but it couldn’t keep with the faster cars until we got to the corners where it would catch very quickly the Porche’s and BMW M3′s. Two reasons; they are probaby aren’t race prepared cars and also not driven by somebody with as much track experience, however they are twice as powerful and cost £40,000+ more than the little Mx5 which is always great to remember as you hunt down the next car owned by somebody with all the gear but no idea.

Main photo found on Flickr by jrw1982, and others were purchased from Xtreme Sports Photography or taken myself.

The top eight of the thirty drivers on the day go through to the A Final based on points scored during the heats. With two wins and a second amongst some of my results from the five heats I started 6th in the A Final, with none other than Rhys alongside in 7th (we were tied on points). An extremely close and physical race saw me move up to third and claim myself a step on the podium. It was a really enjoyable evening and I met some great people who I am sure i’ll see again in the future. Video below (i’m wearing my blue and white karting suit and ususal white crash helmet).

We arrived on Thursday night with the car unchanged since the last meeting at Croft, besides straightening some panels and replacing the faulty fuel pump. Qualifying was a case of learning the track again as it was six months since I was last at Silverstone and back then the car was very different! The car still felt very balanced and I qualified 19th, which I was happy with given the grid size.

Race 1, like all the races felt more like karting as it was all about pushing people down the straight to gain places using the slipstream. Whilst driving it was hard to work out exactly how things had panned out because the positions were changing lap by lap. I ended the race in 17th.

The Autumn Championship has a reverse grid for Race 2 and 18th place was drawn to start on pole, which meant I would start 2nd. A great launch off the line put me into the lead for the first corner, and I managed to hold on until half way round the lap until the backward descent begun. This was not a Disney film where I suddenly could go ten times quicker than ever before and I simply didn’t have the pace to maintain my position at the front so I knew it was just a matter of time before I was passed. The race was very close and as enjoyable as the battles were, it meant that the lap times were slow and cars were able to catch our group of cars easily as we continued to swap places. As a consequence, losing 13th place to Rhys by 0.021 seconds on the line was difficult to accept when he started from the back.

It was business as usual in Race 3 with no reverse grids. Looking at the timing sheets you’d see I started 14th and finished 14th, however the racing in between was some of the best I’ve experienced all year. The battles continued right up until the last corner and I’ve never worked so hard for a top 15 finish.

My consistancy throughout the meeting meant that overall we finished quite high up in the points in 12th. I’ve got a lot of things I want to develop over the winter which i’ll document on the website as we progress. It was nice to end the season on a positive note with plenty of ideas that will see us come back with a much stronger car next year. Sadly, despite being scheduled, the TV coverage fell through at the last minute and so the event won’t be televised which is a huge shame as the racing was brilliant.

Qualifying was done on Saturday morning with some corners still slightly damp from the overnight rain. The car was handling great and the setup changes since last time out at Brands Hatch had worked brilliantly. I came in feeling as though I’d missed an opportunity as I couldn’t find myself some clear space and set my fastest lap on the only clear lap I had. So when I picked up the results sheet and found myself in 6th I was quite surprised. It was nice to see my name up there at the top and I’m glad that it’s starting to worry people.

Race one promised so much but made for a horrible end to the racing on Saturday. I started from 6th and was aiming to break away with the lead pack. All looked fine until lap two came around and Rhys tried a move up the inside into the first corner. He didn’t completely commit to it and we both braked very late. Ileft him space on the inside as we turned in, but being off the racing line there was less grip. The car slid wide and as soon as it dropped the back wheel in the gravel I lost the slide and it started to spin. Unfortunately it spun into the path of Rhys and bounced him into a tyre wall and turned me round the wrong way facing the rest of the grid. I was able to rejoin but the wing wasrubbing really badly on the tyre,I finished 16th.

With the thoughts of race one in my mind overnight, I just wanted to secure a solid finish during Sunday. Thankfully race two was much more promising.  A good start saw me hold my position up the front. I found it difficult to pass other cars in this part of the grid as it seemed the engine was easily matched by the others and I was probably being a bit cautious after the incident in race one. Still, after some very close battling and losing my first wing mirror of the year I finished 6th – achieving my best finish of the year.

On the second to last lap of race two the engine had cut out in the hairpin. Concerned that it was a fuel surge issue we put about five more litres of fuel in, but we had never had this issue ever before even when we ran the tank on nearly empty for trackdays. The car just felt slow, and even after a good start to get up to 4th I started slipping back down the order. The engine started cutting out regularly on left handers toward the end of the race. The worst one causing me to clip a tyre wall, as I unexpectedly lost drive. Frustrated, I finished in 12th after losing 11th place on the run to the finish line after another cut out in the hairpin.

As I said at the start, a mixed weekend. There are lots of postitives that can be taken away such as the improved setup and strong qualifying which shows I understand how to get the best from the car now. We need to solve the cutting out issues, which I believe is the fuel pump. Due to the nature of the fault we won’t know if we’ve fixed it until next time out. The damage also needs repairing as seen in the photo at the top of the page (that was just after race one!). TV footage is on Wednesday 21st September on Motors TV, and with all the incidents I was involved in and just being closer to the front I’m sure that I will feature again more frequently. Next race is Silverstone for the Autumn Championship at the end of September.

I really can’t thank Phil enough for allowing us to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday to get the weights right, and I hope that it will improve the handling of the car further. All thats needed to do now is re-check all the camber and caster values that may of been affected by the changes. A job for later in the week! We worked on the principle of acheiving 50% weight across the diagonals which seems to be regarded as the accepted method. It didn’t seem like a huge change to the car for the time involved but then alignment often seems like that until you can see the results on track.

The weekend started late on Saturday afternoon with qualifying. Brands Hatch is a great circuit but the short lap means that with 35 cars out on track at the same time, getting some clear space for a quick lap proved very difficult. I locked in my quickest time early (lap 5) which had apparently put me in 4th place at one stage as others struggled to match it. By the end of the 15 minute session the order had roughly worked out and 12th place in the qualifying session was my best result all year. The lap time was 59.58, slightly quicker than on Thursday testing but not much. The confusing groups system was then calculated by the series organisers and gave me starting positions of 10th in race 1 and 9th in race 2.

Race 1 was to be my first taste of what racing further up the field was like, and it was all captured on my on board camera in the video below. I got off the line well, but struggled to get across to the inside for Paddock Hill bend, any places I lost were soon made up as I made a move round the outside into the second corner which luckily payed off nicely. The first few laps were full of overtaking which soon settled down and the positions looked set for the rest of the race. The safety car was released on around lap 10 which bunched everybody back up again. For the re-start I stayed close to the car in front but mucking up the change into 3rd gear cost me big time and as we crossed the line I had lost a lot of time. Determined to make up for my error I pushed hard and managed to get myself another place in the closing stages of the race even if it did require a bit of a nudge to follow through the car in front. Taking the chequered flag in 7th was the best finish of the year by far and something that I was keen to repeat in race 2.

For Race 2 I gridded up in 9th with Rhys again directly in front of me. Another good start off the line meant I could secure my position at the end of the first lap. My aim was to try and keep with the group ahead of me and for the first few laps that proved successful. A group of eight cars including myself formed a train of mazda’s at the front of the field. An opportunity presented itself as the car in front of me ran wide out of paddock and I quickly dived up the inside into the hairpin and secured 7th. As the race progressed the field became more strung out and back markers were again a factor during the race. Despite setting my fastest lap of the weekend with a 59.35 I couldn’t hold off the car I passed and dropped back down to 8th. Rhys was working his way through the cars in front and sadly I was only able to watch him getting away as I didn’t have the final few tenths of a second per lap to join him. The remainder of the race was all about making no mistakes but continuing to push on just in case anything happened in front. I crossed the line in 8th and was delighted to of achieved two top 10 finishes in one weekend.

From where we were at the last round, just scraping the top 15 a 7th and 8th place finish was absolutely brilliant and I’m so pleased I was able to get the results I wanted. The racing closer to the front was much more like the British Karting Championships and it felt much more rewarding. This doesn’t mean that I’m just going to leave the car alone though, I will continue to do my research and already have formed a list of changes and improvements that will be made before the next round.  Results are available here – I was in qualifying group 1, and group D of the Ma5da MX5.

It’s hard to tell just how quick we were, and we’ll have to wait for the weekend for that, however people are not driving away from me anymore and I was holding the pace of people who run much further up the grid. Best time of the day was a 59.6, Rhys got down to 59.0 so that’s the closest we’ve been all year. I’ll be heading back to Brands tomorrow to check out the competition and see if I can pick up any more tips!

Qualifying continued with the same old story of having to learn the track, learn any changes to the car and then attempt to put a quick lap in before the 15 minutes (8 laps) was up. At the start of the session I followed a few cars to get a feel for the lines, and braking points, etc then I managed to get myself some clear space to put a few quick laps in. I timed this slightly badly as on the last lap I caught the group in front of me and decided I would back off for one final quick lap when the chequered flag came out, meaning I didn’t feel I got the quickest time out of the car by about half a second. Still, 24th was not too bad and due to the way Ma5da works with the group systems it meant I would start from 19th and 20th in my two races.

Onto race one and I got a good launch off the line, then missed a gear which was a bit of a shame as a lost a bit of ground. Fortunately I was able to make up for any lost time further round in the lap and moved my way up to 17th. A race long battle for 14th with Matthew Short and Nick Gilfillan proved tough and after a lot of overtaking at various points on the circuit I had to settle for 15th by 0.116 seconds on the line.

Starting from 20th this time for race two meant that i’d have to push extra hard in order to make the top 15. I didn’t make any places off the start, but then again I didn’t lose any! Each lap I was able to work my way further up the grid, and by lap 5 I had got myself into the target 15th position. It was becoming more difficult to pass as the difference in lap times was quite small amongst the people in these positions. The slipstream affect was also a real factor at Snetterton and being able to get away once i’d passed somebody was proving tricky on the long straights especially when battling with Chris Lovett. It took two or three laps before I could secure my position. On lap 7 the red flags were bought out due to a serious incident were a car rolled and the race was declared despite the fact that only 50% of race distance had been completed. When races are stopped like this, the results are counted back one lap to the last fully completed racing lap. Luckily I maintained my 14th position, as I couldn’t remember on which lap leading up to the flag that i’d got past Chris. Had the race of continued further then I may of been able to make up more places as I was fast closing in on the five car battle for 9th.

So to summarise, we’ve had the strongest race weekend yet. I feel comfortable pushing the car although I need to try and eliminate the understeer which has developed, and this is where we need some time to do testing and not just turn up on race days expecting to be quicker. Another second a lap would put us firmly in the top 10 when combined with a better qualifying, and given my progress up until now then I hope that by the end of the season this is acheivable. Race results are available here. I appear under Ma5da MX5 Championship – Qualifying Group 1, Race 2 & Race 3.