How to Start Racing - buy your copy - accelerate up the grid

Posted: June 26, 2016

From the Team Manager’s seat the whole weekend was one roaring success.  What in September was a nucleus of an idea, turned into reality at Oulton Park for our first Fun Cup Endurance race of the season.  As is often the case, the success of our weekend we owed to the planning, time and effort afforded by the team prior the 12th & 13th April.

Our engineers: Graham Hope of Vitesse Engineering; & Matt Friend of Track Toys, screwed the car together with care & precision to give us a reliable first race.  Mike Sheridan gave us perfect pit stops every time with accurate and efficient refuelling.  Jo Hoad ensured the pit stops ran to schedule, ensuring we did not pit alongside our neighbours in the narrow Oulton Park pit lane. Big thanks should be afforded to the army of friends and family who came to give moral support & encouragement to our 3 rookie drivers.

Jo posted 55 tweets keeping our regular CAT clients in the loop on test & race day.  We arrived back in the office on Monday to a host of emails & lots of positive comments wishing the team well. We finished 20th out of 23 starters & achieved our objective of:

  • Finishing the Race
  • All 3 drivers to complete 2 stints each
  • Drive with 100% safety
  • Finish with cars behind us

We delivered our plan & met all objectives - well done drivers.

If you have not raced before, our objective may sound a little unambitious.  For those that have & do race, you will know the sensory overload you experience when you participate in a dynamic sport for the first time.  The objective side of your brain appears to shut down & you rely on your instincts to get you round. So the objective was fair & achievable & we met it head on.

My lasting thought from the weekend is how difficult it is to mentally prepare experienced track day drivers for racing.  The frenetic urgency of a race day is something we try to avoid on track days, as for safety our aims and objectives have to be polar opposites when compared to racing.  Seat time is what you need & that is what our drivers achieved in abundance, well done.

We now simply need to go faster!!! & run with the pack.  This will come with experience & as I said at the beginning hard work & dedication. Our 3 new racers are now busy formulating their next achievable objective for Donington on the 18th May - a busy weekend with a 1 hour & a 4 hour race all on one day, plus testing and qualifying.  Watch out for Jo’s tweets @CATDT

Colin Hoad

I've been described as a a driving 'Yoda', Im not to sure about that, but I have enjoyed a long career and love passing on my driving I have had the pleasure of working with many people that just want to improve their skills as well as training novice drivers to become expert race drivers. In this blog you'll find articles about driving as well as my thoughts, car and product reviews and ideas that come to mind about driving and the world of Motorsport.

Fun Cup / Racing / Race Academy

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