1st & 2nd Race - Thruxton
My first single seater race kicked off at Thruxton on the 9th April 2004 for the first round of the BMW UK Championship. Friday testing went reasonably well considering that the conditions were not to great. This was as the circuit was plagued by on and off raining which makes it near impossible to test things on the car to ultimately finding a set up for Saturday’s Qualifying 1 and 2. Fortunately though despite the conditions I ended up in the top half of the time table which was respectable considering that with twenty-two on the grid there is only six Rookie’s (drivers who have never raced cars before) including myself.
Saturdays Qualifying one and two was not great and driving with engine problems was the cause of this problem. After qualifying one, where I ended up an extremely disappointing eighteenth, a full one second off of the leaders times I was describing to my engineer (Juergen) that the engine was really struggling from 5th to 6th gear (taking too long to hit the limiter.) After looking on the telemetry we thought this problem could be due to gear ratios, so we made a shorter 5th and 6th to hopefully cure the problem.
Unfortunately this was not the cure and trying my best I pulled the car to nineteenth. This was once again extremely disappointing. As a result we called the BMW Schnitzer Technicians to check my engine for a problem which we could not identify. After half an hour of the technicians studying the data from the cars ECU, they identified the problem as having a malfunctioning ‘lambda censor’. The lambda censor is the fitted on the exhaust it sends information to the management system that there is sufficient fuel. Which clearly wasn’t the case.
Comparing my straight line speeds to my team-mates on the data, in order to see how much speed I was losing in qualifying amounted to 1.3 seconds. This taken away from my actual qualifying time would have put me 8th fastest and quickest Rookie Driver by some five positions.
As it was the opening race of the first Formula BMW race in the UK, the drivers and I were all honoured to be in the presence of a surprise visit from Sir Frank Williams (Head of Williams F1), Dr Mario Thiessen (Head of BMW Engineering) and Sir Murray Walker. As a result of being a Scholarship driver I was one of nine drivers who was able to ask them some questions about Formula BMW and F1.
Race 1
In Race one I drove an average race to get from 18th to 13th overall, which was 3rd placed Rookie behind my Brazilian team-mate Marcos Felipe Vilhena and the winner Ross Curnow.
Race 2
In Race two I drove a great race from 19th on the grid to 11th overall, which was 1st placed Rookie. I overtook the three rookie’s who started in front of me on the way, this was Ross Curnow (Panther Motorsport), Sam Bird (Carlin Motorsport), and Marcos (Soper Sport). I also set the fastest rookie time of a 1.07.356.
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