2015 Season Finale - The Stars At Darley

The season finale of the Darley Moor club championships had an added element of intrigue as quadruple points were on offer for each race - but with only one race per class during the day rather than the usual two races.

After the Donington Park meeting we had a couple of issues to resolve - a slight leak from the fuel tank necessitated a switch of petrol tanks and a slight clutch slip when accelerating hard in second gear necessitated the fitment of some new clutch plates.

Stripped and checked...

...the Sigma Slipper Clutch then had new plates

With a mathematical chance of winning both the Formula Darley and Mini Sound of Thunder championships, we took part in the Saturday afternoon test sessions to ensure that everything was fine - and apart from a couple of small and easily fixed issues, we were ready for the Sunday race day.

After signing on, we found out that the newly-crowned 2015 MotoE European Champion Daley Mathison would be racing against us in the Mini Sound of Thunder race, which added a but more interest too.

Our first qualifying session of the day was for the Formula Darley race. As is now usual in this qualifying session, there was a lot of traffic. Despite getting in a good lap, Brad Vicars pipped us to pole position by 0.12 of a second - so we would start 2nd in class (3rd on the combined grid).

In the Mini Sound of Thunder qualifying, an issue with the gearbox became apparent but we managed to work around it and qualified 3rd in class (9th on the combined grid), behind Brad Vicars and Daley Mathison.

Our first race of the day was the Mini Sound Of Thunder race. A small wheelie off start had us close the throttle, which resulted in us entering the chicane 5th in class. On the first lap we passed Christopher Hough which moved us up into 4th position. After this, the gearbox issue that we noticed in the qualifying session got worse. By trying to work around the issue (using different throttle openings and different gears) we managed to catch up to 3rd placed Alan Jones - but with the gearbox issues we had trouble getting by. After several laps we managed to take 3rd position and by using our preferred racing lines through the chicanes, we were able to immediately drop 1.5 seconds off our lap times (posting a fastest lap of 1'03.40), which secured our 3rd place finish. The race itself was won by Daley Mathison, who was on race record pace throughout, with Brad Vicars taking 2nd place and securing himself the championship for the third year in a row. We wish our sincerest congratulations to Brad for that great feat!

With the gearbox problems getting worse, we decided not to participate in the final race - meaning that we would finish the season in 2nd position in the Formula Darley championship and 2nd position in the Mini Sound of Thunder championship - meaning that we met our target for the 2015 season!

The end-of-season results also mean that we will be attending the Darley Moor Presentation of Awards in February 2016 to pick up a nice couple of trophies! (we even feature on the awards webpage)

And last but not least I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of my supporters (if you're reading this - then that's you!), Dave Carson Snr, Steph Carson, Lorna Carson, Tim Poole of the Poole Performance Centre & I would particularly like to thank Michael Mulvaney from Proficient Security and Lavastorm Analytics for their continued support.