Race day came along and probably went as well as we could have expected. We used a borrowed gearbox for the first race, it was actually an ex-Edenbridge gearbox from a 2003 car and the gear ratios were a mile away from what we needed. We didn’t realise, and the guys who lent us it didn’t realise, that it wouldn’t hold in second gear so we went to the grid for the opening race and after the green flag I radioed back to the pits and said to Geoff [Steele – team manager] that second gear wouldn’t hold and that is why we fluffed the start a little bit. But we kept in there even though we really needed second gear round Druids and as people started to fall off in front of us I thought ‘Hang on a minute, we’re getting somewhere without getting anywhere!’
It was unsettling the car with us not having second gear, and it was ill-handling in the rear, but we limped through to tenth place to get a point and some free tyres and it sounds alright afterwards. We got a point, we didn’t shine but we got a point, and we did it despite the fact that the car wouldn’t stay in second gear so I was quite pleased with that.
For the second race, we had to go out with the same gearbox but I decided to try and hold in into second gear round Druids forgetting that with having a quickshift, the engine killed and it locked in second gear at Druids and spun me round so it was game over for that one. The third race we changed back to the original Schnitzer gearbox which we knew had no fifth gear as that was what we had broken in qualifying and we altered the car and changed some of the rollbars to treat it as a test session and it felt so much better. The tyres were wearing much better in the four laps that we did but I had to pull it in because the lack of fifth gear meant we were on the rev-limiter right along the start-finish straight and I didn’t want to blow the engine. I had a gearbox problem and I didn’t need an engine one as well!
