PLR on Track: Last time @Rockingham

Well, unfortunately, it has happened, Rockingham is now officially closed as a circuit. Such a shame as the place was a fantastic place to go watch races and thrash the hell out of your car on a track day. They also did something that I would love to see more circuits do, on Thursday nights during the spring/summer. They held a car meet, for like-minded people to meet up and share their cars. If we had lived closer, it was something we would have been going to a fair bit.

But let’s get onto the track day. As you can imagine, it was one of the last to be run, and was packed. The varioty of cars there was great, we had a couple more Mini’s, Fiat 500 Abarth, A couple of GTR’s, and a good amount of BMW’s, Fords and Renaults. In the morning the circuit was wet and greasy for the first run, it was understeer city. There was no way for us to get power with the mini still having no LSD.

Later on in the moring though, the circuit did dry up and we where able to really start pushing the Mini around the track. We should really have put the Yokohama semi-slicks on at this point. But we had a plan to put them on in the afternoon… this unfortunaly didnt pan out though.

With the circuit drying, we were really starting to show the Mini’s pace, catching and passing Clio sports. BMW race and road cars, Mazda MX5 and so on. Our lap times where down to around 1 minute 50 seconds on none sticky rubber. There is still plenty of pace left in the car, which hopefully an LSD will extract.

In the afternoon. the heavens opend for about 30-45 minues and absolutly soaked the track. The idea to use the semi-skicj tyres went out the window obviously. But we still made the most of it, using the torque of the engine in higher gears to pull us around the circuit. From there the circuit never really dried up so we just pounded around not overly pushing the car as it was not worth it. Well that was untill the final session. Then things did get cold, wet and slippery, and sideways… pretty sideways.