With half the race gone, theres only half the race still to go

In my [second from] last post i left you guys on a cliffhanger, wondering whether the next post would be today, tomorrow or yesterday. If you correctly guessed 'today', congratulations! You must be psychic, you freak!!


Back in my latter teen years, i lived with my dad in a little 2-bedroom terraced cottage in the village. Downstairs we had a little kitchen, and a dingy bathroom, but there was no living room. Instead, the huge area of space formerly the lounge was my dad's office.

My father is an 'engineer consultant', meaning folks hire him to design engine parts [for cars, bikes & others] and/or explain to them why their previous rubbish designs have gone horridly wrong. His desks- and usually the chairs, floor and rest of the room- would be covered in drawing tools, A1 design sheets, computers & peripherals and most interestingly- aluminum prototypes of the parts he was working on. He would bring them back from the factory and conveniently dump them on the floor in the one spot i was most likely to trip over or bash into them- a careless injury we both fell victim to several times, but he just never seemed to learn from.

I would come in from school or college each day and it wasn't hard to tell how my dad's day had been. Some days i would be flatly ignored. Other days i'd walk in to be greeted by an ecstatic HELLO!; have some cylinder head model shown to me and asked what did i think. In pretty much both cases i hadn't a clue what i was supposed to say.

Given the good relationship i have with my dad, the fact i lived in his office a few years and met many of his colleagues, it does seem strange that i've never been exposed much to the industry he works in. I've never been to any races before so the racing industry is an alien world to me. So, when he invited me, it was with mixed anticipation that i went along to see his latest project working for Embassy Racing, WF01, race at Silverstone, in the final round of this years Le Mans Test Series.

Le Mans, 'The grand prix of endurance racing' is the grand prix for sports cars. Unlike formula one- a dull sprint for race drivers in prototypes that are only built to survive the race- These are actually intended to be real cars for real people on real roads. The main race lasts a full 24 hours(!). It is accompanied by the test series- in which cars race for, oh, "only" 6 hours. Also, rather than the Formula1-esque procession around the track, four classes race at different speeds on the track at the same time. Each car only competes with other cars in the same class, but they all have to negotiate each others traffic. The race the long, cars often do not make it to the end and positions are constantly changing.

Saturday was test day, and rich-people-get-your-old-museum-cars-out day, so we went down to the pits to check up on Team WFR - formerly Embassy Racing until they went bankrupt last year- and their car, WF01.
Apparently the night before they'd had, well, a bit of a crash. The back half of the body work was in a big pile lying around outside, with dazed mechanic dude casually picking bits up wondering what would be good to take home for the kids.




fortunately, race teams pack spares, so the car won't be racing like this.




As you can i see.. it was one of those times when i didn't think to bring a camera. Hence the shakey pics off my dads phone.

Surprisingly, I didn't get bored, to both my and my dads delight, in fact i enjoyed it so much i agreed to come back the next day for the full 6 hour course.

The car did pretty damn well. About an hour in it reached 3rd place in P2 class. It then reached 2nd place which it held for an hour, causing my dad to bounce around in his seat. Then, with a couple of hours left, something went wrong and they had to get back to the pits. Apparently something to do with a generator? They lost a lot of time but got it back out. The car made up laps and managed to get 4th place, respectable given the circumstances. The final race results are here (p2 class are in blue). And, if you're really sad and geeky, the timings and mid-race results are here.

We didn't leave empty handed though, dad went back to the pits to pick up something dazed mechanic dude had promised for him- a trophy from the smashed car body work, which, having also designed, he was immensely pleased with. When we got home he cut it in half and gave me half.. which was pretty immense. So: if u ever see a chunk of carbon fibre lying around in my room, you all know what it's from.



If you look closely at the first picture you can probably work out where it's from.. it's off the main chunk, at the bottom- which was once originally the middle in between the back wheels. The lump goes over a joint in the rear wheel suspension. The edges have been taped over with gaffa tape, after he cut his finger on the rough edge earlier. At least that's one careless injury he did learn from.