22nd Passion for Speed
Another year, another day, and another Passion for Speed event is yet upon us. Yes, the 22nd Passion for Speed has already come and gone.
The MHCC club extended invitations to numerous competitors, including our RETRO racers from KZN. The entries soon swelled to close to 40 yet again during these trying and testing financial times. This is simply one racing event that we cannot miss, and we prepared for this well in advance for this one.
Our Friday stint was not what we ultimately wanted but then, with temperatures well into the 30’s, great lap times were never on the cards. We also lost a gearbox during practice in the morning and had to replace it. At least our qualifying turned out in our favour and we put the Datsun 1200 on pole position for class F later that afternoon.
Saturday’s first race (08h10) and we were super stoked with finishing 9th overall and a class win but we now landed up having to replace the button clutch plate for the 2nd race. That (2nd race) got underway at 14h30 with a full reverse grid meaning I now had to start from 21st position as so determined by the starters. It was a cracker, and I made up 2 solid places even before we got into the first corner (the lap timer trigger only reflected 1 position at the start finish line) which was then a double-waived yellow for safety concerns. It was really a do-or-die effort in order to get through the slower cars as quickly as possible, and I carved through the field like a scolded robber’s dog in full flight making up no less than 17 places by lap four. The race was then red-flagged due to an incident in turn 1 and we returned to the pitlane with a car at max temperatures in the sweltering heat in excess of 33º. It also came to our attention while in pitlane that the exhaust has come loose from it rear mountings and with no time to repair we simply removed it for both safety and time constraints.
At the restart and with still 4 laps to go, it was Datsun’s one, two, three and four (Coetzer Jnr, Kruger, Coetzer Snr, Richards respectively) out front. With a deafening sound now coming from the exhaust, this Datsun was now a new animal (like a nimble mongoose), and it felt like a different car. I chased down one, then another and was now in the hunt for the overall win. I got into 1st place with still 2 laps remaining and held on for dear life driving the wheels off the Datsun 1200 GX and finishing just ahead of Johan Coetzer Jnr by a mere 0.182 sec and in the interim also setting a PB of 1:15.802 on some of the thinnest racing rubber out there on track.
A huge thanks goes out to Francois Jacobs for the superb preparation and dedication to the car throughout the weekend as well as to FulRace Engineering for their engineering assistance.
Veni, vidi, vici.
Final 4 laps of race 2.
