Saturday saw us at racing at Seafield road. A short stretch of country road that ran for about 1.6km's into the foothills of Napier. I'd entered this event last year and broken the record that was previously held by local man Bruce Gardener. (Interestingly he was a passenger in my car at the time I did the winning run of 48.1 seconds).
For the first run this year I took Adam up as a passenger. Adam, like myself, hates being a passenger. Preferring the drivers seat. I convinced him to come along for the ride and that I would be taking it easy as it was just a familiarisation run.
On the way up the hill the car felt underpowered and lacked the explosive power it usually had.
I almost felt embarrassed at how slow the car felt. I could see nothing wrong under the bonnet and a check of all the systems showed no faults. It looked like I was going to have to take a purely non-competitive attitude to the weekends racing and dismiss any hopes of winning.
I walked around talking to the other competitors telling them of my inexplicable lack of engine power softening them up for what was surely going to be an appallingly slow time for my first run up the hill.
Adam and I got back into the car and belted up for the return drive back down the hill to the pits. As I pushed on the clutch pedal ready to select 1st gear a light came on on the dash. It was the launch control arming light. I stared at it, somewhat puzzled as I had not been using the launch control function on my last run. (It's an option I have to reduce wheel-spin, whereby the on-board computer limits the engines horsepower until the clutch pedal is released.)
Then the penny dropped! The high boost switch and the launch control switch look exactly the same and I had accidentally flicked the wrong one on the start line at the beginning of my run.
I had done the run on low boost! No wonder the car felt down on power! Doh! I laughed at how stupid a mistake it was.
Once back at the pits I walked over to the timing caravan to see just how slow my low powered run was. Now you may recall that I won the event last year with a record breaking time of 48.1
How surprised do you think I was when the time came back at 47.06! a full second faster, and that was just my warm up run taken with a passenger and on low power! It was going to be an interesting day.
However no matter how fast I drove there was no way I could win the event. You see tarmac hillclimbing in the North Island is dominated by one man and his machine. Graeme Sutton and his Jedi.
Graeme races a tiny single seater race car that's powered by a very potent Yamaha motorcycle race engine.
The power to weight ratio is almost obscene, and as you can imagine the little machine just explodes off the start line and rockets up hills like nothing I've ever seen before.
However despite the laws of physics telling me otherwise, I have always maintained that I believe I can get my 1200kg Mitsubishi Lancer to one day beat the lightweight Jedi to the top of a hill.. However Saturday was not going to be that day. Although I managed to drop my time to an incredible (in light of the previous record) 45.81 seconds this was still 1.32 seconds behind the Jedi. I had won my class and driven a Tin top over the Seafield rd course faster than any man alive but it was Graeme who took out the over-all honours. I settled for second place.
At prize giving that night Graeme thanked me for giving him the only true competition in all the years he's been racing the Jedi. That in itself is something to smile about.
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