About 35 cars at Wroughton Airfield near Swindon, organised by easytrack. The car we had was just the Track XR as my twin turbo is a little poorly, soon to be fixed by the 4 litre engine I am preparing
Robert's account
The day started out badly, I overslept and I had a headache! We were, however, soon on our way and it is only about 45 minutes from Bracknell. The weather was good but there was a heck of a cross wind! I went out first, the track seemed pretty good, but there are too many hairpins for my liking! The cars tyres are too hard so on the slow tight corners she was just understeering and I couldn't get the back to step out
For the next airfield event I think crap rear tyres are in order When I put the camera in the car
I followed Matt in his Capri, I had seen his sideways/backwards efforts before so I thought it may make some interesting footage,
which it did! Movie's to follow in a couple of days....
I decided to take some pictures and as I was watching Andy make his way past a few cars he caught up an Exige who obliginly let him past, after which he spun!! Luckily I had my camera and managed to get a pic of him passing the Exige and then facing the wrong way! He then proceeded to pass the cars he had passed before but then he span again, unfotunately too far away for me to get a picture
Upon returning to the pits the XR now supports some orange bollard coloured marks down the side
After talking to Tony from Easytrack I managed to blag a ride in his Integra Type-R. The car is great, revs up quickly (red line at about 8 grand) the car turns in superbly and into the hairpins just throws the back end of the car out well wide
This happened on
every hairpin, great fun ...... as I said, we need some crap rear tyres (or remove the front prop shaft, hmmmmm.....)
The brake pads are now very low on our car, about 1mm left in them! We decide to carry on as we are going to replace the discs anyway! Towards the end of my last session I could hear a slight metal grinding noise!! I carried on as I knew the only thing I could damage was the discs which we are going to replace. The brakes were still working quite well though. When I got back to the pits someone came up to me and informed me the fuel tank was half hanging off!!! One of the straps that hold the tank to the chassis had snapped and the right hand side of the tank had dropped by about 2 inches, we decided to call it a day, there was only about 20 minutes left anyway!
Andy's account
My first question was "where's the burger van then?" - I hadn't really eaten much that morning, banking on a repeat of the excellent catering provided at our last Wroughton track day. Sadly though, I was forced to survive until lunch on a bottle of water I found stashed in my glovebox. Punishing.
Apart from that, the day was great. My first couple of sessions were pretty uneventful, trying to discipline myself to brake early enough for the numerous hairpins wasn't easy, and I seemed to be getting worse rather than better sometimes!
In the last session before lunch I was out with an Exige and a RS2000 (amongst other things) - to my surprise, I managed to catch up with the Exige & eventually overtake. Unfortunately this gave me a severe overconfidence crisis and I managed to spin off twice in the remaining few minutes of the session - very embarrassing indeed but at least the guys in the RS2000 got a laugh out of it! Fortunately I didn't cause any damage that T-Cut can't fix (erm, unless you include damage to the cones that is
The highlight of my day was a passenger ride in a Westfield Megablade (Fireblade engine) - completely different experience to any other car I've been in, and I still can't believe the guy wanted a ride in the Sierra afterwards!! No comparison.
