[Kevan]

Race reports - 8th June - Le Manx

   

   

Not only is it TT race week but Le Mans 24 hours is this weekend…and we had a room full of racers for a great nights racing with cars from many decades of Le Mans.

The plan for tonight, everyone do 5 qually laps with both of their cars, the best qually lap then being used to calculate a predicted perfect score over the three heats.  The closest to their target predicted score being the winner.

This is a great leveller, it rules out sandbagging and there's no advantage to be had anywhere other than keeping your qually time in mind and glancing at the score screen to see if you need to go faster or slower, try to focus on your own race, be consistent, don’t get drawn into trying to catch or keep up with faster cars…the one thing you can’t allow for is luck which comes in two flavours, good and bad.

The two eras of racing tonight were Classic Le Manx for pre-1975 cars (no Group B’s) with the second era being Group C and LMP’s.

Quite a few new cars were seen racing tonight, it’s always good to see diversity on the track with a lot of these cars resurrected from club members' collections

Mike B was back tonight and kindly brought a thumb controller for Ed to try.

Our two visitors borrowed a couple of cars each, Alan racing a Porsche 917 and a Nissan R90 whilst Nigel raced a Ford GT40 or was that a Matra Simca…and in the second race a Audi R8C…or was that a Matra Simca again?  Alan fell for the oldest trick in the book, getting drawn into trying to catch faster cars with innevitable marshall intervention but went really well and had some super racing.

The closest race was Heat #6 in Le Manx Classic as Brian (GT40) in Red, Geoff (GT40) in Yellow and Alan (Porsche 917) in Blue all crossed the line less than 1.3 seconds apart!

Gav brought a selection of Ferraris, Mike brought the same two cars as the first Le Manx we did last December with the Aston Martin DBR1 being the oldest car on the track.

Chris brought a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 on a SlotIt HRS2 AW chassis, the same setup we recently saw on two of the best handling Rally proxy cars, it went surprisingly well, or is that unsurprisingly well as that seems a great setup.  A 3D chassis is under development for this car…

Kev raced his Porsche 908/3 again as we saw in the last Le Manx plus a resurrected SCX Audi which went surprisingly well with a NSR motor.

Andy’s cars of choice were very quick, the Porsche 917 was easily the fastest car on track tonight…but the handicap system doesn’t seem to favour the fastest cars.  The Toyota Gr.C was more than a match for anything else in the second event.

Geoff and Brian seemed to want to race each other, GT40 vs GT40 followed by Porsche 956 vs Porsche 956, Brian won the GT40 battle, Geoff won the Porsche battle.

…and Ed was racing properly for the first time, the thumb controller obviously what he needed.

Le Manx Classic pre-1975

   

Heat wins in heat order for Ed, Brian, Kev, Andy, Nigel & Geoff

Le Manx Group C & LMP

   

Heat wins in heat order for Ed, Geoff, Kev, Andy, Nigel, Alan, Brian & Chris

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