Finishing 1st in the first qualifier after some frantic setup changes to help rectify my tail happy TC, which was as much of a shock to me as it was to the others on my heat. I met Stuart for the first time after this race as he pointed out that my car was ‘out of tweak’ so a little assistance to rectify this issue saw a good result in the second heat, although my batteries dumped I would have been on target to win that qualifier too. Stuart lent me a set of Lipo batteries to see how these compared to my second hand Nimh’s. Wow! Amazing, such a difference a decent set of cells make. I managed to qualify 1st again! This placed me in the B final in 4th place! Not too shabby for my first go!

During the 1st final I clipped a barrier and my steering arm popped off and lost me 30 seconds. I ended up finishing 3rd behind Giles and Elliott. A bit gutted as I was chasing Elliott a treat until my little ‘off’. Then the second final and starting in third place on the grid, I had a great start and followed Elliott and Giles for a good portion of the race, Elliott passed Giles, and a couple of laps later tipped a corner and lost his lead to me and Giles. I was chasing Giles down and eventually I managed to take a nice tight line onto turn 2 and passed with no contact. I then managed to gain a nice advantage. With about 3 laps to go my new Lipo’s decided to dump on me as I’d not had the time to fully charge them beforehand. I was totally on target for a 1st place in the B final on my first time racing a 10th scale touring car at Newbury!

I’d like to thank all the guys at Newbury for helping me to setup my car and a big thanks to Stuart who let me borrow a spare Lipo and set the ‘tweak’ early on in the meeting. Also to Tim and Matt for helping me with my setup.

Iain on the other hand had a foul night of ‘engineering central’, so the less said about that the better.