2008 Rotax Super 1 Series - Round 1 - Clay Pigeon

The name on everyone's lips all weekend at Clay Pigeon was Hugh Joff. It seems that he was all around the paddock with very few competitors getting away without a visit from Hugh Joff. There were drivers with more than one call from Hugh Joff and the damage he caused ran into thousands of pounds.

The appearance of Hugh Joff was exacerbated by Mother Nature dumping what seemed like the entire volume of the recently melted polar ice caps on top of the hill over a period of 24 hours. I'm still moist and it's now Wednesday.

There has been much heated debate about the calamitous race meeting and for the record, I like Clay Pigeon, I like the circuit, I like the burger van. I'm not keen on the quagmire that almost claimed my car on Saturday night and the paddock facilities are modest at best, but it's a cracking place and I hope that this meeting's lessons were noted and everything is done to ensure the next time we visit similar problems are not repeated.

Having said that, the drivers must bear the majority of the blame as far as I am concerned.
The standard of driving bordered on suicidal at times and murderous at others. This is meant to be a showcase for some of the best driving talent in the UK and quite honestly, if this meeting is indicative of the abilities of our drivers, then we should all give up right now, go away somewhere quiet and become hermits with long unruly beards and a strange musty smell. It's just not on.

On Sunday afternoon, the track dried enough for us to go to slicks. What was plainly obvious to everyone except perhaps the village idiot was that the racing line was bone dry, but venture 1 millimetre off that dry line and it was a slippery as a fully greased-up eel on an ice rink. Now, this situation caused the starts to be particularly treacherous as the two columns of karts can not all fit onto the nice dry racing line. My dog could have worked that out and he's as dumb as a box of rocks. You can't win the race on the first lap, but you can sure as hell lose it. And lose it many people did. Hugh Joff loved it but he was the only one. Most of us had tons of work to do to repair the karts and get our drivers back out on the grid for the next race.

I didn't have any quarrel with the officiating, although I was quite annoyed that in the second effort at Rotax Senior heat 5, there was an accident at the start (surprised? I wasn't) and the race was allowed to continue until lap 4 when the red flags came out and they called it a result! That cost us big time. I thought that was very cute of the officials as they were fast running out of daylight.

I witnessed a young driver and his mechanic/dad/financier arrive 30 seconds too late in the cage and was refused access to the dummy grid. They both proceeded to throw their toys clean out of the pram and back into Mothercare. Tough. There's a reason for the strict timing and if you can't make the 25 second journey from your awning (they were parked right next to the cage!) to the collection area in time then tough titty to you.

I'm lucky enough to be engineering one of the quickest drivers about and we were very confident going into the final albeit not from the front row as we had planned. We were let onto the dummy grid at 3 minutes to 6.00. No way were we getting a race, but fair play to the officials, the grid marshall called us all over and said that we'd get one shot at this and any fannying about, false starts, red flags, hesitation, deviation or repetitions would result in an immediate cancellation of the race. Fair enough, I thought. I hoped that maybe Hugh Joff had gone for the day and we might just get this thing done but oh no. The karts came round after a very generous 2 rolling laps and the lights turned green. The bright red cone that separates the two rows of karts at the start of every race must have jumped - of it's own accord - and lodged itself under the front of one of the karts rendering the steering as effective as a one legged man in an arse kicking contest. Predictably the driver speared off into the barriers and the race was red flagged and called off.

This was a disappointing end to a promising if mildly moist weekend. We'll be back at Shenington for round 2 in the championship.