IT’S ALL O VAL NOW
Rob Austin swapped his British touring car for a National Hot Rod racer at Hednesford Hills
To be honest, I was ready to park the thing up. This was my return to National Hot Rods, having sampled one before at the Thunder 500 meeting at Ipswich a couple of years ago. This time, I had been firmly planted in the wall and I thought it was game over.
National Hot Rod racer Mikey Godfrey had kindly offered to lend me his car for the National Championship weekend at Hednesford Hills in early August. It is a one-off meeting which generally attracts some of the best short oval races from across the UK. This was not for the faint-hearted.
So as I was squeezed into the turn two wall during my opening heat, I knew I had just received a proper welcome to the short oval world.
I actually hit the wall very hard, and I thought it would be game over. If I had taken a whack like that in my Handy Motorsport Toyota Avensis British Touring Car Championship car, I would be forced to park up and that would have been me out of the race.
However, Mikey’s Vauxhall Tigra is a tough old bird – I took it a bit easy on the way down to the next corner, not sure whether the thing would turn in or not. It was fine, she kept going and I was right back in the hunt. It wasn’t until I looked at the car after the race that I saw the damage to the wheel – it was pretty badly twisted. I was amazed that I was able to keep going.
Stepping into any new formula, particularly against the best drivers that the sport has to offer, is always going to be tough, especially as the stakes were so high for the National championship. Hednesford Hills is the fastest National Hot Rod track on the calendar so there was plenty for me to get my teeth into.
I struggled a lot with understeer in the Tigra, and that was frustrating. I went testing on Friday with Mikey and the T and B Motors crew, but I couldn’t get comfortable with the car. People were telling me I would “get the hang of it” – but I sussed the track pretty quickly. After all, it is only two corners!
I was able to brake deep into the corners, but from the apex to the exit of the turn I was having a lot of push on the car, which meant I was struggling to put the power down.
I knew there was something in the car that we couldn’t track down, because it was behaving very differently to the last time I raced one at Foxhall Heath when I could really get stuck in.
We tried everything we could in terms of the set-up of the suspension to sort it out, but nothing seemed to change it. National Hot Rods are essentially the same principle as any racing car, but it does have one crucial difference in set-up: there are cross weights to play with as well as the normal suspension settings. The cars are allowed a certain amount of weight on the inside and outside tyres, and that can also change from front to rear. Messing with those is a new area that I had to try and get my head around.
The cars are extremely well put together, and the levels of presentation are high. They use two-litre 250bhp engines and weigh 700kg – so they are a pretty potent combination and they are very evenly matched.
I took part in three heats on Saturday in the build up for the big race on Sunday. Despite my rather robust introduction in heat one, I finished 13th in that event, and two more top 20 finishes meant that I made it onto the grid for the grand final on Sunday.
It wasn’t until they were interviewing me on the grid for the final that I discovered it was going to be 75 laps! I didn’t know the cars could go for that long – mind you, with 14-second laps, it goes by in a flash. Still, it is 20 minutes of all-out action.
Because of the way the car was handling, I was spending a lot of time looking in my mirror trying to keep out of the way – but I had a grandstand view of Chris Haird backing up his World Final win with the National Championship title. In the end, I finished in 18th position. There had been 55 entries into the meeting, so that wasn’t too bad on the face of it. However, it was quite frustrating, because I wasn’t really able to go on the attack but I managed to get through without too much damage – after all, this wasn’t my car it was Mikey’s! He wanted it back in one piece. Despite the fact that the results were not quite what I had hoped for, I am going to go testing with Mikey to try to get to the bottom of the engineering puzzle we had. I love finding solutions to engineering problems and I am like a dog with a bone: I will not be satisfied until we are able to find the answers.
One thing that always strikes me about Hot Rods – apart from how welcoming everybody is – is the quality of the racing.
With the laps so short, the cars remain bunched. It is even more hectic than in the BTCC, and the levels of concentration and skill needed are immense.
From what I saw, the amount of contact and aggression is even more than I get in the British Touring Car Championship.
I might not have gained the results that I wanted, but I have to say a huge thanks to Mikey, all the other competitors and the officials of National Hot Rods that made it such a special weekend for me.
Watch this space – this might not be the end of my National Hot Rod career just yet.