RED21 wrote:Alpiniste,
What made you to end up in the gravel at Druids? Driver (that always my excuse
) car or an external influence (BBC special FX dept)???
Despite what DavidG was saying it was - sadly - only attributable to driver cockiness. It was near the end of the track day - always worst time - and I was out on track with only a handful of other cars, one of which was a full race prepped M3. We were starting to get into serious racing - bad idea - and I made the mistake of overtaking him on the inside along Brabham Straight into Paddock Hill Bend. I was on the inside, he wasn't giving me ANY room and I thought I would be OK to take an early apex complete the pass and run wide. BUT I clipped the kerb. The marshals described it as the most beautiful 100mph sideways down the hill with lock on and power. I in the meantime was inside the bloody thing sweating buckets and trying to stop the back from stepping out any further or swapping ends ! Everything seemed find until the bottom of the hill. The suspension compressed and CATAPULTED the car onto the opposite lock, swapped ends and ploughed sideways through 30m of gravel before hitting the tyres. Again the marshalls were wll impressed - me less so by now
We dragged it out, drove it round to the pits where one of the race teams let me use their garage. We checked it over, straightened the exhaust pipe took the tyres off and refitted them and I left the track an hour later to drive back to Scotland. A little detoru into another local garage to empty 4 buckets of gravel we'd missed trapped up inside all those bloody plastiuc bits bolted to the bottom - the mechanics were great and mucked in. Set off for home by about 6pm - started out at 30mph being uspicious that somethign might have been missed in our checkover - but by 2am in the borders I was pushing on when in a dip in the A1 I was flashed by a camera ( pretty much flat out !! ).
So ended what I reckoned was going to be my worst day EVER ! Spun off at Brands, cracked the gelcoat on the wing and rear panel AND photographed at a speed that would involve immediate ban from driving.
Thankfully it was not so bad, the impact with the tyres was in the 15-20mph range so was easily repaired. BETTER stil whilst showing the damage to mate and telling him about the speed camera he assured me I woudl be fine. Why ? The number plate ended up somewhere on Brands circuit - lucky buggar ( is their a statute of limitations in the UK
)