Caterham Goodwood Track Day May 2004
May 10th, 2004 by Tim Skipper
Round two of the 2004 EVO Caterham Academy is another sprint, this time at Goodwood on June 5th. With this in mind, Peter and I took advantage of the only track day available there before the event - a TrackFun (ha!) event last Saturday.
I trailered the Caterham down to Peter’s on Friday night where he kindly provided another excellent dinner and a decent bottle of A-Mano, and I provided the entertainment in the form of the DVD movie from our Spa trip earlier in the week. An early night and an even earlier start later we were on our way for the one-hour journey to Goodwood.
I’ve never used TrackFun before, but Peter had and was, he said, attending against his better judgement following a shambolic pair of previous events elsewhere. We were told there would be around 20 cars on the track, and therefore the Goodwood rule of only 5 cars out at once wouldn’t cause much of a delay. Ha!
We got there nice and early, bagged a space in the end paddock out of the way and set about unloading and setting up. We both still had the grippy Avon CR500 tyres we bought for Spa on our cars, but had brought our CR322 Academy control tyres as well. The plan was to have some fun in the morning on the good stuff, then switch to the control tyres for the afternoon to get some practice in no-grip mode. This plan went quickly out of the window once the shambolic organisation of the day started to make itself felt…
The safety briefing was exactly that - brief. Some schpeel about overtaking whatever side you like and the overtaking car having to come off line to do it (huh?) and half the flags missed until a Marshal started waving them about.
The day was to be run like this. You run like hell back to your car, jump in it and roar back to the pitlane, whereupon you’ll find 35 other cars already queued up. Eventually (about an hour later) you’ll arrive at the head of the pit lane where a traffic light controls your access. Nobody there checking circuit passes etc. You’ll then get five laps then be called in to join the queue again. So that’s an out-lap, three fast laps assuming nobody holds you up and an in-lap.
Peter was quicker off the mark than me as I still had my video cam to set up, so I joined the queue about 15 cars further down. Eventually did one session to learn where the circuit went and get some heat into the tyres, and came in again. Waited over an hour for the next go because I had to return to the paddock to reset the tyre pressures before joining the end of the now longer queue.
Of course you can’t really leave your car in the queue and go off to do anything because you have to keep pushing it along. Except some people did and subsequently held everyone up even further.
Second session thankfully clear and managed to get a reasonable three laps in. It was obvious it was going to be a long tedious day and that doing any more track time on our sticky tyres was pointless, so we returned to the paddock to switch to the CR322s. When we got back to the queue again the track was closed – an E30 M3 had lunched it’s engine on the fastest part of the circuit and dumped all it’s fluids on the track.
By now it was 12.10 and we heard rumours that they were going to shut the track for lunch for an hour at 12.30, so we abandoned the cars in the queue and went off to eat early. As predicted the track didn’t open again until 1.30. Thankfully lunch was at least very pleasant, sat outside in the sunshine at the Cadillac café.
My third session of the day, and first on CR322 control tyres was eventful – you cannot afford to give away any precious cornering grip by braking with any lock on like you can on the 500s. Unfortunately I arrived at the right hander after St Mary’s doing just that… spun and went sideways into the gravel trap. Thankfully I managed to get out under my own steam and before the next car arrived behind me so it didn’t cause anyone else any delay. It didn’t half rattle when I braked for the next corner though!
Back in the queue Peter and I had sussed a better arrangement for monitoring tyre pressures, as we were never very close in the queue we each took turns to keep Peter’s RaceMate in the car for the other to use when they came in. I dropped my pressures down 2psi at the front and 1psi at the rear for the next session.
Session four was much improved, with stabilised and slighty lower pressures at the front I could attack St Mary’s much harder. Subsequent viewing of the video footage at home showed it took over a second off my lap. A good session with no traffic so a good three fast laps, actually four since they must have lost count and I got a sneaky extra one in!
Session five was my last of the day, I couldn’t be bothered to sit in that huge queue any further. Again I decided to go down a further PSI down front & rear as an experiment, but it was frustrating because I felt I was quicker on the last lap despite clipping the grass on the exit from Chicane and was baulked by slower cars on the previous two. Again the video footage shows that I was, by a couple of tenths, quicker than the previous session.
So despite being a poorly organised and over-subscribed day, and definitely not worth £250, I’ve at least found my setup for the next event and crucially learned the track. Goodwood is a very very fast circuit – in a Caterham 7 mostly flat out partially blind corners. There are a couple of places where a lot of time can be made up, which you’d never get to learn in the three practice goes you get at the event-proper.
A video clip of my spin and gravel trap detour can be found here (MPEG-4 format, requires QuickTime to view).
