KUTUKA MOTORSPORT
ANGLESEY 1
A favourite circuit amongst the Jaguar drivers, there are two prime spots for disaster for the unwary cat, the immense stop into Rocket, and the deceptive turn 1, especially at the start. Rocket is one of those braking points that seems too early, until you actually get to the crest of the hill and find the corner, at which point shedding another 10mph suddenly seems necessary, 2008 saw collisions and multiple offs here in the XJS race alone, and with news of a combined XJS and saloon grid, it was always going to be eventful.
Turn 1 is an unforgiving, deceptively sharp left that catches the grid out off the line, a repeat of ‘08’s first start wouldn’t be popular, but also claims casualties early in the race as they try to carry that bit more speed in that first-lap pursuit.
Matters are made more interesting by what we can only call a low-grip surface. We know there was a lot of input from the single-seater brigade when they built this place, and it seems that the tarmac must suit other tyres, as the Jaguars do struggle for grip here in the fast corners.
Bizarrely the weekend will prove that the standard racing concept of the lower, stiffer, more powerful XJS walking all over saloons will prove to be anything but true, and that the fastest of the XJS number will be from the traditionally slowest class, the weekend apparently designed to reverse our expectations.
Testing.
Alex Harrison the first casualty of testing, blocking a rear brake into Rocket as he wrestled with a misfire he spun at over 100mph going up the hill, lucky to steer the car into relatively minor contact with the marshall’s post at the top of the slope. Hasty repairs at
Mark Russell unusually caught testing, and Andrew Harrison also out to play after Snetterton’s ignominy, Roger Webster showing his beard in the ever-improving E car. Conew spotted on track in the XJ6, but overall a surprisingly low turnout for what the circuit unkindly classed as the “slow sports” car session…
Qualifying.
Busy track with 25 Jaguars out there, that’s about 45 tons of car, and with a speed difference of 11 seconds between fastest and slowest, not a lot of road to play on. Surprise appearance of Gail Hill in an XJS, despite switching allegiance to the saloons she’s found a cheap toy to abuse and she’s come to molest it.
Surprise was that the saloons were not being made to look silly by the XJS, the T1R tyres the XJS run should usually hand a time advantage, but with cars skating everywhere on the low-grip track the Vredeshite tyres not such a handicap and the more compliant saloons finding traction, it’s Simon Lewis’s XJ6 with an inspired 2nd place.
Andrew Harrison underlining the low-grip levels by placing his D class XJS third ahead of Stewert Lyddall’s usually-unbeatable V12. Gail Hill makes her first 6-pot appearance in over a year with that new Mellow Yellow class E car, which out-paces Mark Russell’s big 6 litre.
Saloons and XJS now mingle, as Gwinnutt shades Alex Harrison’s still-misfiring E car, Merrett’s monster-horsepower E unable to transmit the grunt to the tarmac and only just holding off that inseparable duo of Dorlin and Bye.
Nothing in it between Coppock’s V12 and Boon’s XJR, Dorlin mixing with Ray Hill’s more powerful E class XJS. Woods leads class A, which roughly equates to the XJS class D regs, and outpaces Drage and Webster, ahead of Dracula.
Sewell leads Slater and Connew, Baby Doyle takes a big step up from Snetterton, outpacing Dangerous Brian by a clear 4 seconds, with Seath’s tail-end XJS caught in their saloon sandwich as the back of the grid arranges itself according to age.
RACE
The start was always going to interesting, and the front runners did all they could to make it so. Good start from Palmer, lousy start from Lewis as he almost stalls the car and bogs down. Lyddall lights the rear tyres and powerslides all the way round him from 4th, pushing
The top three use the horsepower to grab a scant gap as they head into Rocket. Lyddall goes left to out-brake Russell, but Palmer drops it under braking and spins, forcing the pair to suddenly change their line from and brake from what should be a slow left hander to a dead stop. Lyddall can’t quite stop and tags bonnet to bonnet with the stationary Palmer, Russell neatly parking up with the pair of them.
Lewis sails past the jam back up into second, Alex Harrison rejoins in third as saloons and XJS part to flow round this roadblock like the
Amazingly, despite 25 cars hurtling at an accident hidden over a blind brow, nobody collects the stationary trio, and the potential for serious carnage is avoided.
The pack are slowed trying to work past this three car jam, made more interesting as the drivers try to extricate themselves, the cars not badly damaged but with Palmer finding first instead of reverse and Russell finding himself being shunted backwards down the hill it gets a bit interesting. Russell makes the first break and joins back in 13th, Lyddall breaks free into 15th with Palmer in 16th, three very fast cars now in the mid-pack with Merrett, who has made an unholy Horlicks of the start, back down right in the middle of them all.
Harrison in the lead, looking for red flags, Lewis right on his bumper and making the big saloon really shift as the other
Ray Hill leads Coppock’s big v12, with Gail Hill in the flying yellow shed giving hard chase.
Rapidly apparent that the field has miraculously missed the pile-up and the race continues without red flags, leaving the bizarre spectacle of a roadgoing class XJS heading the field and an XJ6 hanging off its rear wing as the lead pair settle in for an interesting afternoon of it.
The battle for position rages throughout the pack as XJS and saloons fight each other, and themselves. Richard Dorlin, Chris Boon, and Dave Bye wrestle with Ray Hill’s XJS in their midst, Bye the winner as he makes 2 places on lap 2, to jump to 5th overall, Boon losing out as Bye passes Dorlin and himself, and Hill takes advantage too.
Gail Hill has dropped far down the pack after startline difficulties, and finds herself wedged between Peter Dorlin and Coppock, Dorlin making it stick and dropping her back into the clutches of Merrett, but Dorlin not being done now harasses Coppock’s 6 litre V12.
Merret has punched past Woods’ saloon, as have Lyddall and Palmer as they begin their recovery drives, but with another spin to his name Russell falls to 20th place.
Sewell passes Connew in the middle of all this, lap 1 as usual the busiest of the race but this time lap 2 is barely any different, and the race doesn’t let up from start to finish.
The big chase is mid-pack, with Palmer, Lyddall and Russell carving through the field with their awesome acceleration advantage, even as the head of the field begins to be backed up by a misfiring Alex Harrison, the red car surging with increasingly-sporadic acceleration to create a mobile roadblock, difficult to overtake as it suddenly drops 300bhp onto the road and sets off like a scalded cat, then cuts out again as it finds a corner.
Palmer carves through the traffic quickly, the surprise being that he so easily dispatches Lyddall, who is still desperately searching for rear grip, on lap 2, but Palmer is killing saloons and XJS alike at an alarming rate.
Alex Harrison’s misfire worsens and he drops out of the race into retirement on lap 3, the lead pair now with a 5 second margin over the pack and still extending.
Merrett loses to both Palmer and Lyddall on lap 2, Slater in the pursuing melee drops 2 spots to the again-recovering Mark Russell and a committed drive from Sewell, whilst Seath’s superior XJS loses out to a clean move by Patrick Doyle.
Lap 3 and Coppock powers past Boon, but it’s Palmer on the move. He now takes advantage of the bunched-up pack, passing Dorlin and Gail Hill on lap 3, then Chris Boon and Lawrence Coppock on lap 4.
Russell jumps Sewell, as Baines and Connew duke it out, the yellow XJ6 the victor, but with another spin Russell pits with car troubles and into retirement.
Gwinnutt is secure in 3rd with a 3 second gap to Bye, but unable to catch Lewis, whose pursuit of the leader is pushing the pair ever further ahead. The field briefly settles to catch its breath, Drage and Russell pass Woods on lap 4, Webster also taking Connew, who is having a busy afternoon.
Woods and Drage have been battling it out for saloon v XJS unmodified honours, the S the faster car, but getting past is another issue entirely and it is lap 5 before he can make it stick as Russell carves back up the order.
Palmer’s progress is slowed as he reaches the higher order, lap 5 sees him claim Ray Hill’s scalp, but the big casualty is Lyddall, whose failed move on Hill into Rocket sees him take to the grass to miss her rear end, his car stalling and refusing to restart.
Still on the move Palmer dives pasts the duelling twosome of Bye and Dorlin, these two are swapping laptimes to the nearest hundredth of a second and are a constant 4/10ths apart lap after lap, and Palmer is able to treat them as a single car to fire past with the serious pace advantage his car shows under corner exit acceleration. His next target is Gwinnutt, 5 seconds up the road.
Boon and Dorlin are still arguing the point lap after lap, and this gaggle gets entertaining as they swap places as they sit right off Coppock’s bootlid looking for a way through even as he closes on and dispatches Ray Hill.
The front twosome are still pushing each other on, but by lap 7 Lewis has made his decision, unable to eat into the gap to the leader he settles for 2nd place and the saloon win rather than risk an error in a desperate move to prove saloon superiority, the point has already been made that on this track saloon can live with XJS.
With momentum on his side Dorlin seizes the opportunity and passes Ray Hill shortly afterwards to put an XJS buffer between himself and Boon, the trio now all attempting to occupy the same piece of tarmac and squabbling in under ¾ of a second, laptimes near identical. But Boon’s XJ40 is not easily cowed and lap 10 sees him pass Hill too, he’s only half a second off Dorlin’s boot as they flash past the flag.
Slater has Webster in pursuit, the track not suiting Webster’s car but the pair of them glued together on the tarmac, with Baines a scant few yards up the road and the car apparently ailing.
At the tail end Brian George is first to be caught and lapped, Baines having parked the X type briefly but able to get the car moving again he will only be caught right at the chequered flag.
Last lap and Palmer completes a remarkable recovery, passing Gwinnut for 3rd place overall. He’s now within 8 seconds of p2 and closing at the rate of 2 seconds per lap on the cruising leaders, but he needs another half distance and Lewis isn’t fooled into making that mistake, the front pair are not pressured.
To the flag and an exuberant
WINNERS AND LOSERS
WINNERS
Andrew Harrison – lucky bugger went from fourth to first in one corner, but just about held off the marauding Lewis to take the first ever dry-weather class D win. Helped hugely by the track surface negating engine power, the car is packing the same engine built out of scrap in the Snetterton paddock, but the lack of horsepower is simply not critical here.
Simon Lewis – won the saloon race by 11 seconds, chased the race winner very hard every lap despite a tyre disadvantage, and makes that big saloon jump kerbs like one of the ballet-dancing hippos from Fantasia. Yes, I watched it once, try not to faint.
Jaguar racing – mixing saloons and XJS sets a dangerous precedent, and Christ knows how it would have worked elsewhere, but we have to admit that was quite a race. The only problem is the class system goes right to hell, if you can’t pass the saloon to race the other XJS, or vice versa, you’re not even battling the wrong class any longer, you’re with a whole other species. It’s interesting, but not what you came for.
LOSERS
Chris Palmer – kind of a winner and a loser all at once. Hell of a recovery, but don’t drop the race win at turn 4 of lap1, you did the same trick last year and you had this race in the bag.
Stewert Lyddall – it’s a left turn mate. Heading deep into the corner to out-brake Russell when the tarmac disappeared and a Palmer materialised. Hindsight says a slightly slower, tighter left would have won the race. Bugger.
Mark Russell – probably fancied this race, but a little slow in qualifying, a first corner incident, and then a spin whilst on a kamikaze mission, it didn’t really work out for him when it perhaps should have, clear victim of the low-grip tarmac.
The most bizarre opening lap to date, with the busiest grid of the year and an unexpected winner...
KUTUKA MOTORSPORT AWARDS – These are the trophies the JEC and CSCC don’t give out, and are purely a reflection of the opinions and views we’ve formed from paddock debate. The only rule is, a Kutuka driver cannot win any of the good ones:
Driver of the Day – sorry Ray, we don’t agree it was you mate, nothing personal, but Chris Palmer passed about forty-seven thousand cars on Saturday, and he was easily our driver of the weekend.
Unluckiest driver – Alex Harrison – lying third and looking handy for second when the car failed.
Most inappropriate livery – Ian Drage, with “Slikcat” and “Dyno-Rod” it’s the only car on the grid that sounds as if it’s sponsored by pornstars.
The “where did he pull that from” qualifying time: Simon Lewis, superb.
The “Ambitious but rubbish” overtaking trophy – Stewert Lyddall.
Red Mist trophy – Mark Russell, no contest.
The Fantasia award for best Jaguar pirouette – Mark Russell again.
Duel of the Day – Bye v Dorlin, might as well weld them together.
M25 award – Palmer/Lyddall/Russell for the elegant parking at Rocket.
The Lost Lunch Trophy – Roger Webster, for stating, without any thought to his phrasing, that last year Alex Harrison rammed Gail in the rear here.
The Steve Avery Award – Mark Russell, mostly for his test day antics.
The “Where’s my microphone” Award – Andrew Harrison for his dismay at having rehearsed his winner’s interview and finding out there wasn’t one.
Beard of the Week – Roger Webster takes both days without contest.
The “Spirit of Club Racing” Trophy – the entire XJS and saloon crowd for a relaxed and more friendly, collaborative weekend than has been seen for many races.
