Stock Hatch at Pembrey - 2005
The Narconon® UK Race Team just had their 6th race meeting!!!
This time it was at Pembrey Circuit in South Wales.
After two intense weeks of getting the cars ready, engine re-builds and clean-ups the team had a successful weekend.
Testing was on Friday the 8th of July. It all started quite well, until Niki found a major oil feed problem with his car. It was fixed before any engine damage was caused. JJ and Niki, nevertheless, had a good test session. It was a new track for them and so the testing was essential; their laps were getting faster and faster every session.
Qualifying was on Saturday the 9th of July at 9am. Niki had 2 quite good laps, but then a wrongly selected gear caused his engine to over rev damaging all the exhaust valves. The result was no compression, and it was back to the drawing board. The whole team rebuilt the engine; the driver’s girlfriends were even grinding in the exhaust valves.
Due to the amount of traffic in the qualifying session neither of them got a flying lap in. This would lead to a lot of excitement and overtaking in the race. JJ qualified 13th on the grid; Niki at 16th. Out of the 16 Fiesta XR2s they happened to be 2nd and 3rd quickest.
The 1st race was at 1:25pm in the blazing sun. JJ and Niki both had good starts and took a couple of guys in the first corner. This race was full of action, bumping and paint swapping. The race even had to be red flagged and restarted due to the amount of broken cars in dangerous positions. The restart allowed everybody to bunch up again. JJ finished 5th in class; Niki finished 7th in class. They both overtook at least 5 cars… in fact they lost count.
The Sunday race was quite literally “door-bashing”. Niki, 16th on the grid; JJ, 10th. The race started off well with Niki overtaking 4 cars on the first corner getting one car behind JJ. 1 lap later, an unfortunate incident happened between Niki and JJ. Niki was expecting JJ to make room, JJ was expecting Niki to back off. They had a side-on 90mph collision, which dented in two doors, smashed a window and slightly miss-adjusted Niki’s suspension, but as usual, they carried on, only loosing 1 position. Niki dropped back another 2 places due to a miss-aligned wheel. JJ was well in for the final, but then was flagged in by the marshals to pull off a dragging bumper. He went out again to finish 22nd; Niki finished 16th.
The team also met two guys there (Johnny Dawes and Enzo Amico) who are great people and we hope to see them at Lydden Hill at the end of July.
This was a very successful weekend, as the team did 6 races altogether.
If you would like to come and see JJ and Niki race, then come visit the team on Saturday the 30th of July and Sunday the 31st of July. This race meeting will be at Lydden Hill, which is right next to Dover. This is a smaller circuit, but it’s worth visiting, because spectators can see almost the whole track. It takes about 90 minutes to get there (from East Grinstead). If you have any questions or would like to come and see the racecars in our workshop, just e-mail the team on narcononraceteam@hotmail.co.uk
Sincerely,
-Narconon® UK Race Team
PS: Have you got a race team cap yet??? (unfortunately we can only ship within the UK)
PPS: Press Release http://www.narconon-news.org/uk/uk_racing_team.htm
