Donington Park - V

Well, yesterday was the day. EvenTT’07 (the annual meeting of TT owners) and track day at Donington Park.

Now, the EvenTT'07 is a bit of a waste of time and I expected it to be. Most TT owners are much older than me and it's difficult to find people that share the same interests. Also, most of them bought TTs because of the looks/image/status rather than for the dynamics and capabilities of the car. That said, I did meet a couple of nice people there that I look forward to meeting again perhaps in the next event.

What I was really looking for was the track time. Now, to put some perspective into it, Donington Park is one of the most important (if not the most important) race tracks in the UK. It has been the host circuit for Formula 1, is currently the circuit for MotoGP and has hosted/hosts many other competitions. The track is beautiful with its hills and descents and it is very involving. It is also very rewarding when you get things right as it can appraise you with very fast laps.

I have also to say that the TT crowd that did went to the track (minority) was very polite and very respectful and that helped the day go smooth. I’m sorry for a couple of guys that managed to put their car in the gravel trap when turning in for the first corner of the first flying lap… They completed the first two presentation laps and that was it, their trackday was over (together with their brakes, cramshafts, carter protection and who knows what else). That meant that the first session was pretty short, due to the red flag stopping it while they towed the TT out of the gravel trap.

When we got back to the track I had a few slower laps while I was associating the corners with the techniques I had learned before. The Craner Curves are particularly challenging because you have to modulate your speed well to be fast but not too much so that you don’t have to brake during the craners. Braking unbalances the car and spoils the line for the Old Hairpin that comes right after, probably spoiling the whole lap.

After I started to get more confident with the track my lap times started to drop and I was feeling confident. We soon had to come back to the pits as the first session was over and I was very happy.

40 minutes later we were preparing for the second session. Went out and that one didn’t have any accidents (well, except for a very good looking yellow TT roadster having a cruise through the mud withoug any serious consequences other than extreme dirt). I lapped the circuit very well, lap after lap and I was gaining a lot of confidence, going on the brakes later and later and on the throttle earlier and earlier. The Craner Curves were now natural for me and I was very happy. A few laps later I saw the chequered flag indicating that the session was over again. Time to go back to the pits.

Just 20 minutes before us going out for the third session it rained. It didn’t rain much, but it seems that it was enough to wash out the track. We went out to the track and the car was completely different: I had no grip in the rear end, so the back was really twitchy and I was getting a lot of oversteer. I still managed to put on some laps in a reasonable time, but towards the end of the session I forced it a bit too much when entering the Old Hairpin and the back of the car snapped out. I couldn’t control it and went out of the track. I could just turn it enough so that I wouldn’t hit the gravel trap, but I did have an excursion through the mud as well. The worse thing was that from inside the car I couln’t see if my rear wheels had hit the gravel or not, so I tried to get the car back in the track, which it did without problems and crawled back to the pits to check my rear wheels, tyres and brakes. I was not happy.

That was the last session before lunch, so the car would be out of the track for a while. Before my next sesson there was a session for newbies (people that had never been to a track before). I spent the whole time thinking about what could have changed my car so much. I drove it in Bedford in the wet and it was far from being that unpredictable. I then remembered that last week, when preparing the car for the track I had swapped the tyres from the front to the rear, leaving the tyres on the rear with less thread and the front with more. I thought that after a few laps it would even out the threads and I would be fine, but Donington is much easier on the tyres than Bedford and the tyres didn’t wear out as much. The end result is that I had massive amounts of grip in the front and none in the rear. D’oh! I decided then that I was going to go out in the fourth session to feel how the grip levels were and depending on the results I would call it a day.

It finally came the time for the fourth session and one of the guys that was driving the car that crashed earlier in the morning asked if I could take him as passenger as he would like to see how the new TT compares to his old one in the track. We went out and I took the first couple of laps easy, so that I could feel the responses of the car. The car seemed to behave quite well and the grip levels were back to normal, so I staerted building up the pace and that was probably the best session I’ve done. I did the best laps of the whole day in that session and my passenger was gobsmacked and I was extremely happy.

The last session was good too, but I was starting to get really tired after doing about 80 laps during the day. Also my car was running low on fuel and in the penultimate lap when coming out of the Starkeys Bridge I started to have dips in the fuel pressure. That was it, I was perfectly happy and called it a day.

Went back to the pits, fuelled the car and then we went out to the track again for a big parade of Audi TTs taking pictures and everything. Quite boring, but hey… Brought the car to the paddock and had it washed to take all the mud and dirt off of it. Had my car looking stunning again and left the venue to cruise back to London. In my way back I have passed a few other TTers that were coming back from Donny as well.

All in all it was a fantastic day and it was nice to race in the same track that Ayrton Senna won the F1 European GP in 2003.