Success in Bedford!
We arrived in good time on Sunday at the Bedford Autodrome, with students leaving school at 6am! Weather was sunny but very windy! The event itinerary was as follows: after registering our team arrival, we have the car scrutineered for safety before the practice race. The practice race was before the two actual races for our race category. Each race has strict rules: 90 minutes endurance on one set of pre-charged 12v batteries and the total amount of distance travelled in that time. There are all sorts of time penalties for bad driving or conduct in the pit lanes, and anyone charging their batteries during a race is disqualified.
During scrutineering, we discovered that we had a problem. There was some electrical fault that took a lot of re-wiring to tr and solve. Finally, we thought we’d solved it! Fernando our first driver got ready to head onto the track, he pushed the accelerator and… nothing. We had to head back to the paddock to see what was wrong with the car. For the next half hour everyone was wracking their brains because nothing appeared to be wrong. The multi-meter was showing charge for the batteries and for the connections, yet the car had no power! It was starting to look like we had travelled all that way to not even race! The spirit of the Greenpower community is incredibly supportive, so we spoke to one of the other teams for guidance. Arthur, the chief of the St. Paul’s ‘Firefly’ team came over and checked our set-up. He had experienced a similar problem at a different event and suggested it might be a battery problem (they can ‘reverse cell’ on occasion, meaning they show power to a multi-meter but in fact are completely flat). We swapped the batteries, and the car roared into life! We were on!
We joined the first race a third of the way through and completed the whole second race. Some very fast driving from the new drivers (Fernando – who got fastest lap, Jason & Jack) meant we were doing pretty well. George managed to make up 7 places in the tail end of the race bringing us from 15th to 8th in that race! He was about to take 7th when time ran out. Such a good day, although treacherous on the Bedford track. Twice we spun out of the track due to a bad pothole on one of the corners. This same pothole caused two other cars in other teams to roll, but thankfully no one was injured.
Our overall results in the F24 category were 11/19 for the kit cars class and 20/31 for the kit & custom build cars. This ranking chooses the best distance from either race. James Murray / Paul Unwin
