Karting in the wet at Teesside Autodrome

Quote
Gav
It was great fun. Despite a heck of a lot of standing water and the slick tyres, there was far more grip than when we race Sunderland in the wet. The fronts turn in much better, the throttle is more responsive and easier to slide, and in the banked corner you could just maintain a constant drift through the 2nd part of it. Clearly, as seen on the videos above, it's still very easy to over do it!

It was hard to feel the hands. The forecast said it was 6c 'feeling like 0c' and heavy rain had been falling since about 11am through to when we finished at 5pm. After the briefing, when the guy said that one guy had to have his hands prised away from the wheel due to the cold in the previous race, and that he, a 35 yr old man, had been crying... it wasn't the best motivation. Needless to say most of us quickly went to get a 2nd pair of gloves. All it meant was that it took about a minute longer for the water to soak through!

They provided wetsuits, but as you can see from the videos, there's so much standing water that it was always going to make its way under the suit at some point (keep in mind that those videos are primarily during qualifying, and as the camera fogged up through the race, it's hard to show you just how much more water there was torwards the end of the race). Every part of my clothing was soaked through afterwards. I didn't realise just how wet I was until we stopped.

It was so hard to see at times. Sometimes due to spray, sometimes due to extra heavy rain. You can't make it out on the videos above (it's a small lens and it had Rain-X applied, so the water just runs straight off). With the visor open slightly, every time you went through standing water, it just shot straight up into the helmet. My face was caked with mud after my 2 off-track exertions.

Practice was OK. I didn't feel I had done particularly well - my faster laps were spoiled by others, and I think I went off on the few clear laps. I did get one clear lap, but was surprised to have started 2nd (29 raced).

I took the lead at the start and tried had built up a nice buffer of perhaps 5 seconds already in the opening two laps. Entering turn 1, which wasn't quite flat in the wet, you can see above what happened. I carried too much speed, the fronts didn't grip, I tried to kick the back out on the throttle to help steer the car, but there was too much speed for the wheels to spin. I lost 35 seconds pushing the car out off the grass, so to finish just 9 seconds behind Graham, who said he hadn't been off the track, wasn't bad!

It was fun to cut through the field afterwards. The only other action was a guy spinning just in front of me, and me coming together with him. No damage done.

The car ride home was painful, with every single piece of clothing saturated, and until we got into the cars and the heaters had started working, we were all shivering badly, but give me another kart and I'd do it all again! Bring on Knockhill!