David Cottrell of DJCRACING - had a great race last weekend at Silverstone in his Formula Vee. David epitomises true club race spirit as his car has been built and developed from his single car garage from his home in Walton.

Last year David - a novice racer - was firmly at the back of the grid and the winter period was spent redesigning a new rear suspension layout, including investing in some new shocks, a new super duper exhaust exhaust from  BTB exhausts plus some new carburettors.

Whilst David's home built car is still a little time away from the front runner's in pace - and definitely budget expenditure! - the racecar is much easier to drive now and David has begun to have some real fun.

Enclose David's race report below - David engineered the Supercharger installation including doing all the fabrication on Racecar's BMW 2.7 E30 trackcar - highly recommended if any of you are thinking about getting a little "boost" organised!

RACE REPORT FROM DAVID:

Nothing like a wet weekend - 19th August

Friday at midnight the tent finally goes up at a damp Silverstone. This is after spending most of the day fixing a number of minor problems on the car that turned out to be not so minor. Being a weekend racer there is no team mechanic to rely on and Friday uses up another precious holiday from the day job.

In practice the track is damp and this, together with the addition of some oil results in a visit to the gravel trap together with a couple of other cars. No damage and the session is stopped while the cars are retrieved. A couple of marshals did try to push me out but the gravel had reliably done the job of stopping the car which was now well and truly beached. It’s an odd site when you see your own handy-work 6ft in the air dangling from a slender rope off the front of a JCB!

So practice is over and the car feels totally different from the last meeting, you no longer have the confidence to throw it into corners as before, rain is threatened and you don’t have telemetry to guide you. A trip to race control confirms lap times and a starting position of 30 on a grid of 36 for the heat. What to do to have any hope of squeezing into the final? Change settings and hope its not worse or leave alone? Ended up leaving everything well alone other than adding a bit of extra pressure to the tyres in the hope that they will heat up a bit more in the cold conditions.

With 50 cars in total and a qualifying race for the final adding another final to the tally of this year was looking doubtful. The race started dry/damp with rain coming down by the end so every chance of being caught out and taking a trip off the track. In the end there was no opportunity for a chat with the marshals and ended up a reasonable 26 out of 36 starters. This followed a close race with three other cars, something which is happily becoming a regular occurrence following the major re-engineering work over the winter.

The result – second reserve for the final. So within touching distance but a bit irritating give the effort to get this far, being soaking wet by this time did not improve the humour. Then there is knock at the window and it’s the driver of the first reserve car, good news he tells me there is no way he is going out in the current conditions (heavy rain) and what’s more at least one of the finalists takes the same dim view of competing in the wet. Game on. The rain means that any power disadvantage I have from the top cars goes out the window… Perhaps it won’t be such a bad weekend after all.

Starting last at the back of a grid of 33 cars in driving rain is quite an experience. Think motorway in the rain and passing lorries, only this is racing not just trying to get to Birmingham! The plan I had was to take it easy for the first few laps find out where the grip was (or was not) and then start pushing. Anyway that soon went out the window as on re-watching the in-car video I passed 5 cars on the first lap. At times all you could see were the red safety lights at the back of the cars in front – then they would disappear for a few seconds completely. Now – where have they gone? Is there still a gap there to get through or not?

Out of 33 cars finished 22nd, which is the best ever result in a final where I’m usually struggling to keep up with the quicker cars. For those who may be thinking that only 22 finished, no 28 finished the race. So ended up being a very happy drowned rat…!!!!!

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