TYRO National Rnd 2 ? Grantham
Keith Robertson reports back from the second round of the TYRO Nationals held at the Gonerby Moor Track in Grantham.
The A1-Racing club were the hosts for the second round of the TYRO series. With terrible weather leading up to the event it was touch and go to see if the meeting would even go ahead with most the track underwater on the Wednesday! But the committed team of organisers did a fantastic job to prepare the track to race standard by the time we all rolled in on Sunday morning.
With the sun out and temperatures rocketing the track soon hardened and the dust came up. There were a few spots where some holes appeared but then this IS off-road racing after all.
With my Hyper 8.5 Pro UK having worked so well at the first round, I left the set up the same and in practice the car felt good. The first round however was a disaster as a tyre came unglued forcing me to retire. With a change to Proline M2 Crime Fighter tyres for the second round I pushed a bit too hard and needed marshalling, but 8th in round at least got me on the score board.
For the final round I changed to a softer rear spring and increased the front droop a little to help with the ruts, this certainly helped the handling but again driver errors crept in to put me 8th in round once more. This meant I would line up in 6th place for the A final and I knew that if I could stop crashing I could improve on that. With the meeting running so smoothly there was a brief practice session before the finals and I took this opportunity to try some different tyres.
With Proline M3 Bowties now fitted the car felt better, the softer compound giving more rear side-bite and better traction. At the buzzer I got an excellent start and managed to avoid the incidents in front of me, coming past the rostrum for the first time in the lead! My RB Concepts WS7 III was running sweetly on Bryon Race Gen2 30% and the car was easy to drive. Unfortunately having set up a decent lead, my steering servo failed coming out of the pits putting me out the race. Just one of those things.
The win went to Jim Davis from 10th on the grid who kept it clean whilst those around had problems and he was joined on the podium by Marc Knight and Scott Michael (who had bumped up from the B final). Some consolation for me was putting in 5 of the top 10 fastest laps with the car dialled in the final.
A Final Results
With my Hyper 8.5 Pro UK having worked so well at the first round, I left the set up the same and in practice the car felt good. The first round however was a disaster as a tyre came unglued forcing me to retire. With a change to Proline M2 Crime Fighter tyres for the second round I pushed a bit too hard and needed marshalling, but 8th in round at least got me on the score board.
For the final round I changed to a softer rear spring and increased the front droop a little to help with the ruts, this certainly helped the handling but again driver errors crept in to put me 8th in round once more. This meant I would line up in 6th place for the A final and I knew that if I could stop crashing I could improve on that. With the meeting running so smoothly there was a brief practice session before the finals and I took this opportunity to try some different tyres.
With Proline M3 Bowties now fitted the car felt better, the softer compound giving more rear side-bite and better traction. At the buzzer I got an excellent start and managed to avoid the incidents in front of me, coming past the rostrum for the first time in the lead! My RB Concepts WS7 III was running sweetly on Bryon Race Gen2 30% and the car was easy to drive. Unfortunately having set up a decent lead, my steering servo failed coming out of the pits putting me out the race. Just one of those things.
The win went to Jim Davis from 10th on the grid who kept it clean whilst those around had problems and he was joined on the podium by Marc Knight and Scott Michael (who had bumped up from the B final). Some consolation for me was putting in 5 of the top 10 fastest laps with the car dialled in the final.
A Final Results
- 1 Jim Davis 41/ 1810.97
- 2 Marc Knight 41/ 1821.64
- 3 Scott Micheal 39/ 1824.50
- 4 Pete Stevens 39/ 1831.69
- 5 Andrew Webb 38/ 1802.20
- 6 Alex Gillbanks 38/ 1812.99
- 7 Robert Cork 36/ 1747.23
- 8 Jess Saunders 35/ 1651.87
- 9 Oli O'Connor 33/ 1816.09
- 10 Andrew Price 31/ 1532.48
Thanks to the Grantham club for a fine day and now it?s only a couple of weeks till round 3 at Dartford.
