Piraterc Guest Race Reporter Greg Hill Reports on the 8-10 Sreries at Junction 12 where he claimed the win with his Tecnopower Xray 2010 spec buggy.

A Final Results

The latest round of the fantastic 8-10 Off Road Series took us to the Junction 12 dirt track near Warwick… or Junction 12 of the M40 if you’d rather!!

J12 as we call it recently hosted the BRCA Nationals race so the track had been prepared for that by Les Reeder and his merry crew. The all dirt track, although a bit dusty, was in great condition, and with a scorcing hot weekend ahead the track was looking good for some close competitive racing!!

On Saturdays practise is allowed and the (top layer of) dust was quickly removed by the cars/trucks running and the track settled down for the rest the weekend and was looking/feeling great…

Les was keen to ’save’ the track so limited practise from lunchtime through til 5pm = plenty of track time for most… but then it depends if a certain XRAY Team Driver blows his engine up and really wanted more time to run an engine in on track!! Track closed bang on 5pm, so you’ll just have to run it in around the field buddy!!

Anyway, we should move onto race day, but before we got there we had a nasty suprise early Sunday morning for those who stayed on site as we had a small fire to contend with… amazingly the on site Burger Van decided it was going to have a gas leak and promptly caught fire… not that i noticed sleeping away in my Tent a mere 10m away, i slept like a log, you’ll have to try harder to get me up early on a Sunday than that!! I should point out no-one was hurt and the Burger van, i’m told, will be back in action sometime soon – good to know!!

Well onto the racing, and rolling toward the end of the 8-10 series now and points are becoming super important, and our attendance to achieve the all importnat required 4-point-scoring-rounds would be completed by the end of this round and only the ‘Final’ double points round at Frankly left after this one – so racing was quiet serious.

It was quiet obvious from Qualifying that certain drivers had raced recently at the Nationals here, or had put in some time with practise the previous day as the pace had improved from the Nationals and Qualifying was tighter than some had expected.  I think the Top 3 in qualifying would’ve qualified straight into the B Finals at the Nationals only a few weeks before so the standard is getting serious in the 8-10 series which is great to see..

After Qualifying, which is best 2 rounds from 3 to count, it was:-

So after a tough day qualifying it was just left for the Finals, first up we needed to collect one of our XRAY drivers who decided he wanted more track time by qualifying in the D Final so he could bump up all the way to the A Final along with the rest of the XRAY Team of Greg, Leigh and Carl…. come on Milan you can make it buddy!!

The Final was pretty decent for the first part where the Top 5 / 6 drivers kept it clean and on the track and were giving it a good go up front swapping places and generally having a good old battle.  The track is wide and therefore a dive down the inside, or some experimental lines on certain sections can pay off, however wide off line and you will quickly get into the thick dusty area swept away the previous day, and time can be lost just wheelspinning out’ve there!!

Just before the 1st pit stops and the Top 6 had dropped down to a tight battle between the Top 4 and the scrap continued between myself (Greg), Steven, Carl and Corky, however at this stage Steven was showing good pace and i was already considering ’settling for the points’ if i needed to – 2nd place is better than a lot of other places, and points are making prizes at this time of year – although there was still alot of racing to be done!!

Steven was the first to suffer and had a engine ‘flame out’ which was really unlucky as he was a couple of seconds ahead at the time, but the race (between us) was looking like lasting the whole 20 minutes until that happened, and in reality at that stage as i say, Steven was looking strong, if not the quickest out there… Unfortunate as that is, it is part of our racing and for whatever reason Steven’s engine cut, it did cut and that usually puts you right out’ve contention, and at that stage after a few pit stops now i was clear out front and had a decent gap to 2nd and so i started to relax and try not to make any mistakes for the rest of the race and just concerntrate on bringing my car home with no drama’s!!

Approaching the last minute of the race i thought i knew i had a clear lead, however Corky had kept his pace up and was litterally a few seconds behind as i started my last lap, out the corner of my eye though i could see that noone else had crossed the timing loop after me (before race control called to finish your laps) – i was through and i knew i couldn’t lose…. and promptly crashed on the table top trying a larger than normal celebratory jump!!  Kinda shows we generally drive as fast as we can all the time, so when you push it harder all you do is end up crashing….

I should give a special mention to Milan who after trying to make really hard work of the day racing ended up an excellent 3rd place overall, so well done buddy you did make it after all!!  And an unlucky Steven Childerhouse who had the cut when running strong up front pulled back to a very credible 4th… i’m sure there’s plenty of racing to be done at Frankly, and i cant wait!!! 

Greg’s Winning – Tecnopower’d XRAY 808-2010 car

Cheers – RC Disco

Thanks to Race Central for putting on the event and for the Tech Chart / Images – www.racecentral.org