Brands Hatch GP - 21st May 2017 - Production BMW rounds 3 and 4

As with the first 2 rounds at Cadwell Park I had opted for some Friday testing for rounds 3 and 4 on the Brands Hatch GP circuit. Unfortunately due to limited use of the GP circuit the practise was on the shorter Indy circuit, still a small price to pay for the opportunity to race on the full GP.

As before I had Stuart Waite with me desperately trying to get me to listen to instruction!, it has to be said it's not easy to get used to having someone else in the car but well worth while. Times weren't great but setting fast times could come later

Come Sunday I headed out to qualifying at the front of a 30+ car grid of E30 320's and set about seeing what could be done, times were generally an improvement on last years and surprisingly it Will Davison a while to catch up from 2nd out of the pit lane. Once he was close I opted to hold back, let him past and see if I could learn a thing or 2 by following. Something He'll possibly not allow to happen again as I managed to pip him to 2nd on the grid behind Matt Swaffer, the first time ever I'd been on the front row of the grid. Best time of 1:51.258 was over 2 seconds faster than I'd managed in 2016.

I guess I was under no illusion that Will was likely to come past at some point during race one but he could have waited until the second corner, However the moderate disappointment of being demoted to 3rd was quickly over come when for the first half of the race I was able to stick with the lead pair, towards the second half with the tyres feeling well used Will and Matt where able to pull away slightly. With David Graves and Mark Palmer battling for 4th and 5th behind me it became a bit of a cruise to 3rd, although one eye was always on the mirror watching David Graves slowly making up some ground.

Race 2 was not to be so uneventful a great start by Mark Palmer but him in front of me after the first couple of corners but I wasn't keen on giving up the place so a pretty close battle had begun, I got along side exiting Druids on the second lap and therefore had the inside line into Graham Hill bend, however a coolant leak from another driver was to make this corner a lot more entertaining and we touched resulting on us both briefly ending up on the grass at the exit, despite getting back on quickly David Graves had managed to get passed, I got a bit of run on him, up on to the GP loop but had to back out annoyingly letting Sam Strong, Mark Palmer and Rob Cooper through meaning by the end of the lap I was running 7th. A busy race saw me climb back up to 4th before the end of the race for some much needed points.

I believe excluding Marshalling points I'm now running 3rd in the championship which is a great start to the year.

Destination VLN

It's probably not an unusual feeling for any racer to have a strong desire to race on the legendary nurburgring nordschleife and I must confess it's been a fairly long term goal. The obvious choice being in the VLN series. 

After a fair bit of research and discussing the option with a friend who already runs an E36 M3 in class V5 it would appear that it's almost affordable in the lower classes and with that in mind I found a low millage BMW E36 318is to use as a base car for class V2. It's very early days but the plan is to be out in Germany in 2018, fingers crossed this long term goal can be achieved. 

The car is a 1995 version so have the M42 1.8 engine rather than the later M44 1.9 which would have pushed us into the V3 class  (up to 2.0l)with much faster hot hatches.