[Malcolm]

As we were first timers at Snetterton (for racing purposes anyway) we had to attend an extra briefing with the stewards who talked us through the procedures and positions of the marshal posts etc. A very good briefing but it ate up a lot of time considering we had sign on at 07.45, scrutineering at 08.00, briefing at 08.15 and practice/qualifying at 09.00! And we also had to get sound tested as well. Actually for us that is a bit of a joke…..

Our Mazda MX5 (Spec Miata) ran for a number of seasons in the MAX5 championship so is built to meet their regulations. This means we have a pretty much road standard everything. So when the noise tester asked for max rpm I told him 7250, he asked me to take it to 4900/5000 and of course I overdid it and the revs shot to 5500rpm. Ooops but not to worry as even then we only managed 89dB. How pathetic! You can hardly hear our car!

Our race is a two driver event with 30 minutes of practice/qualifying and then a 40 minute race (£285 entry fee in case you wondered). Over the preceding number of months we had bumped into a number of people and spoken with others, all of whom said they would be entering the Future Classics series. Excellent we thought, there should be lots of MX5’s to play with (and blag spares off in needed). So today we are the only MX5 in the paddock! Hmmmm. And we seem to have a reputation already, not because of anything Glenn and I have done, but because of the MAX5 series being a bit of, shall we say, “a close fought” series that seems to have dried up the national supply of front bumpers….. We need to be on best behaviour here.

And the conditions are not good. The snow may have disappeared from the track (but 3 inches deep 25 miles away according to one marshal!) it is still damnably cold and the track is like ice. Mistake number one coming up. All previous experience in Miata and MX5’s tells us that no matter what the conditions are, you set tyre pressures cold at 32 psi. It has always worked before, rain, shine, hot or cold, a cold set of 32 psi puts you on or close to 38 psi hot. So we do this but being so cold and slippery the track conditions prevent us getting any temperature into the tyres. After 30 mins of sliding around (one spin for me!) we manage to get tyre pressures up to a measly and certainly no grip 33 psi! No wonder we were third last on the grid of 22 starters with a qualifying lap time of 1 min 48 seconds. Both of us are disappointed with this but hey ho, nothing to do about it now.

One aspect of racing we have yet to deal with is the fuelling of the car for the race. We know that the car does roughly between 12 to 15 mpg. But how does that help us with a 40 minute race with an approximate fuel gauge and weight being our only weapon in the armoury? We set to about draining the fuel out of the car and putting in a fixed quantity of 20 litres. I have another 15 minute qualifying session for a Sports V Saloon race for the last race at the end of the day so with not having time to do all this before our feature race qualifying session I will run the 20 litres next, we will drain the car afterwards and see what weight of fuel we get through in the next 15 minutes. The answer is 5 kg (6.6 litres) or 0.33 kg per minute. So we next set to weighing 15 kg of fuel which gives a margin of 1.8kg in case of a restart or a balls up in my calculations! I am quite nervous about this as firstly running out of fuel in the first race with a new series is really embarrassing and also as second driver it will happen to me and not Glenn!