The Club's First Racer! - Part 3 - Oulton Park
Mark has written his latest update following his last race at Oulton Park...
The next round is Silverstone on the 10th June!
Please feel free to join us supporting him - details here
Oulton Park... 25th April 2012
After Pembrey I decided some more tweaks to the car were needed before Oulton park on the 25th April, namely some more weight removal, a remap of the engine management and sorting the geometry out.
Andy at Veysport set to work on ripping a few heavy parts from the car, and I think we took about 20kg out which was good. Also fitted some stiffer front and rear anti roll bars, which were heavier than the original ones so probably lost 5kg there. Put some lighter mirrors on and took out the bonnet catch and a few other bits.
The car had also badly needed an ECU remap since I changed the exhaust on it to a smaller diameter / lighter one, and it was feeling very slow lower down in the rev range. My trusty mapper Romain from Eurospec came down to Veysport and mapped the car on Andy’s Dyno Dynamics Dyno. It was amazing how affected the car was from the exhaust, and Romain squeezed a lot more power from it.
My geometry at Pembrey was bordering on ridiculous due to a seized rear camber bush, so Dixon at DMS supplied new polybushes which Veysport fitted. Then got the geo pulled back in where it should be.
So with all that done the car was ready to race again. I was pretty excited about doing Oulton as I’d not been before and I’d heard lots of good things about it. There were also 20 entries for the race which is a lot!
I got a test afternoon booked at Oulton the day before the race, which was essential as I hadn’t done Oulton before and it’s a very technical track. Testing went very well and I got to pushing the car harder, and saw the laptimes dropping well into the sort of times the guys were hitting in last years VTEC Challenge race. The track is amazing and so technical. Probably now in my top 3 tracks ever! I was sharing the track with some very fast race machinery, such as most of the Porsche Carrera Cup cars and race Ginettas. Scary since I was only watching the Porches race on tv the week before.
On the morning of the race, the track was soaked and it was still raining - not good when you are the only rear wheel drive car in the series! I wasn’t too confident in setting a decent qualifying as the test day had been dry, and I’d never driven an S2000 on a wet track of any sort before! Predictably, I came last in qualifying but only by half a second which wasn’t bad given my total lack of wet driving experience. Surprisingly the car handled very well in the wet, with the exception of Druids corner which had zero grip - had a couple of four wheel drifts through there!
It was great to see some other S2000 owners turn up and have a chat, some new faces and some old!
By the time we were due to race, the track was bone dry though, and I was a lot happier!
Race 1 went ok and I got past a couple of cars to come 14 out of 17 (a few cars retired in the race) Starting from the back was again the killer!
Race 2 was brilliant fun, and after another bad start I clawed my way past 4 cars, with some nice overtakes and my lap times were right up there with the top production class guys, and still much more room to push the car. I finished 12 from 16, which isn’t great position wise but I was going well and I can take a few big positives away - the main one being I was catching up the main pack and starting to push the car even more. Another lap or two and I could possibly have gained another couple of places. My fastest lap was 8th out of the full field, and 2 of theose cars being in the Super Tuner class.
Really enjoyed that one!
I missed the recording off the start line but here’s some footage.
The next round is Silverstone on the 10th June!
Please feel free to come and support me - details here
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