The BRSCC’s North Western Centre hosted a superb day’s entertainment at Oulton Park on 25th May which featured big grids and plenty of fantastic wheel to wheel action.
Aside from qualifying sessions and 9 races, drivers had the chance to hone their skills and fine tune their cars during the 30 minute practice session first thing in the morning.
There were Double Headers for the CityCar Cup and a trio of Mazda Championships plus a 45 minute ClubSport Trophy encounter. All provided riveting action.
In the first Clapham North Mazda MX-5 SuperCup Championship race, Joe Wiggin scored his maiden win in the category. He really had to work for it as there were 6 cars battling for the top spot. On lap 8, he and Leigh Britten made side to side contact entering the Hislops Chicane. Britten took the lead after going across the grass in the middle of this section of track. He was ahead for the remainder of the lap until Wiggin repassed him at Old Hall. When the chequered flag came out, Britten was just 0.191 secs behind. Remarkably, the gap between Britten and third placed Aidan Hills was identical to a thousandth of a second!
Wiggin took another victory later in the day. This also featured drama at Hislops Chicane where he bounced across the grass on lap 3 and missed a gear. This dropped him down to sixth, 3 seconds behind the leader. Undaunted, he kept chipping away at those ahead until he was on the tail of Hills, who was out in front, at the start of the final circuit. He overtook him at Old Hall to take the spoils. Patrick Fletcher also passed Hills before the finish but was dropped back to third when a 5 seconds track limits penalty was applied.
For most of the 20 minutes, Luke Pullen was out in front of the GAZ Shocks Mazda MX-5 Championship runners the first time they took to the tarmac. Right up until the start of the last lap, Adam Sparrow was his closest challenger but he dropped down to seventh (although he was promoted to sixth when penalties were applied to those ahead of him). Pullen crossed the line just 0.090 seconds ahead of Thomas Langford but the latter received a 5 second track limits penalty and dropped to third behind Steve Foden.
The finish to their second race was even closer with Pullen taking his second win by 0.063 secs from Foden with Langford third on this occasion, 8 tenths further back.
Jack Warry overtook Paul Bateman on the penultimate lap of the first Downforce Radio Mazda MX-5 Clubman Championship contest but Bateman re-took him on the last lap to take the spoils. Jonathan Greensmith was third.
In race 2, Bateman was again the first to see the chequered flag, having crossed the line out in front at the end of every lap, but dropped to third when a 10 second penalty for a start line infringement was applied. This meant Warry took the win having finished just 8 hundredths of a second behind. Greensmith had made it 3 for the lead but dropped back in the second half of the contest. However, he was still close enough to Bateman to be classified as runner-up to Warry.
Richard Jepp (Peugeot 107) was in control of the first Nankang Tyre CityCar Cup encounter from the end of the opening lap when he was 2 seconds ahead of everyone else. His closest challengers were Joe Moss (Citroen C1) and Stuart Bliss (Toyota Aygo) but they could only halve the deficit before the end.
Jepp gave himself plenty of work to do to make it a brace of victories when he bogged down at the start of race 2 and had dropped to third by the time he reached Cascades. He knew he had the pace to recover and get back to the front so he didn’t defend too hard around the first couple of corners. Indeed, he was on the back bumper of the leader, Alistair May (Citroen C1), by the end of the second lap but couldn’t find a way past, eventually finishing 3 tenths adrift. Bliss was third once again.
The 45 minute SW Motorsports ClubSport Trophy mini-enduro was red flagged with 17 minutes remaining on the clock due to the BMW 330Ci of Saranga Sothisrihari coming to rest in an unsafe position in the gravel trap at Shell with broken suspension that made recovery challenging.
David May was the initial leader after the restart in his Nissan 370Z but he was overtaken by Jamie Hadley (VW Golf). May then went and had a spin. Although he continued still in second position, he had big flat spots on his tyres. The vibrations from these put his engine into “limp home” mode. By the time he had crawled back to the pits to retire, two of his tyres were flat!
So Hadley took the win with Andrew Dyer (Audi TTCR) and Phiroze Bilimoria (VW Scirocco) in second and third.
The BRSCC would like to thank all marshals and officials for their help in delivering another efficiently run meeting. We hope they enjoyed the racing!
Dave Williams