Race Report from rounds 11 & 12 of the Scottish XR2 Championship. Two points finishes despite a new engine fault so damage limitation as far as the championship goes.
Testing on Saturday was promising with more new engine parts and the car performing much better. Come Sunday morning the weather had taken a turn for the worse as it was soaking wet though with our engine issues this was a bit of a benefit to us. Qualifying was almost trouble free with a hint of the problems to come and I qualified 7th. After a short break and some work to solve what seemed to be a fuel problem we went out for race one and as soon as the red lights went out it was clear the problem was not solved as the car spluttered it’s way off the line, losing us a couple of positions already. We made up a position coming into Scotsman and attempted to hang on to the bunch but the issue only got worse as the race went on, eventually forcing me to short shift in an attempt to keep the car running without destroying the engine. Still we lost some more places and eventually finished 11th.
The break saw us change an awful lot of parts on the engine, sadly not the faulty part which is yet to be traced. This meant race two was simply an exercise in finishing, but some incidents further up the field moved us up to 10th.
The championship has now been wrapped up, with Tim Sleigh's performance in race one enough to take the title with three races remaining. Congratulations to Tim.