With Cowes now a distant memory, I had a call from Malc, trying to convince me to enter the Plymouth OCR series. Initially in my mind, I did the training earlier this year just to get a feel and enter the Cowes Poole Cowes race. That was a good race, but with the boat generally not performing how I wanted on the day it had left me with a bit of uncertainty about the level of enjoyment from this racing stuff. The fact that my Fletcher could easily do more than the top speed we had on the day in Cowes didn't help. However, that engine was sold and a few things noticed which in hindsight explained our problems, and now we had another temporary (and very old) 2.4 200 bolted onto White Fusion. This ran better and we knew from our day out to the Needles a couple of weeks ago that it should do the job - as on that day it was faultless.
Currently work load in my spare time is high, I'm planning for my November firework shows, and really could have done with the weekend to carry out more planning, and at this point the weather looked pretty rough - I can't afford to be broken at this time (or ever) really so if it was really rough I didn't want a wasted journey. However - we went ahead, and whilst this all so far sounded negative - I'M SO GLAD I DID!!!!!
We had a bit of a mad rush Saturday morning, filling with fuel preparing our kit etc, and then launched the boat into the water - it wouldn't start!!! So back to the pits again tried with a jump pack, and away it went. Phew, back in the water we waited for further instructions. First we were all taken on a guide tour around the circuit to familiarise the boats and their crew with the race. Then we headed back to the starting area.
This race, unlike Cowes was a standing start. We all line up roughly err in a line, and then the flag goes up and full power we are away. This differed from Cowes where we all got up on plane at a fairly fast pace and then the green flag went up. I think I preferred this one.
So onto plane and immediately we are in a good position, I think initially we may have been into 2nd or 3rd place. It was looking good. At this point I was very nervous, as was Malc, we headed on the start run towards the first turn, and then 30deg port followed by shortly by another 90deg port then down to a very sharp 135 deg port and then a 135 deg starboard. We nearly got caught out on the first 135 and nearly hooked the boat, nearly pointing us back where we came from! From the second sharp bend it was then south towards a maker with another 90 to port onto the next at about 85 to port going NNE to a final turn of around 95-100deg to put you back on the main straight.
If your can at all understand that, it was a nice tight but fast course, with lap times around 2 minutes. We were seeing speeds of nearly 66mph, and had quite a lot of speed on top of some of the others, but struggled more in the turns, where we lost time to pretty much everything. This other than our own lack of experience, is also down to the boat setup, weight distribution etc. We need to work on that.
So we got to 25 mins into a 50 minute race, and then started having troubles, the engine gradually lost power and we came off the plane. Up went our orange flag, and we had to retire from the race. Damn!!!! We had lost a place dropped to 5th and then regained it and indeed we think could have finished in 3rd!! But it was not to be, and we were towed back to the pontoon.
Attempts were made to get the engine running, at first it seemed as though it may be electrical with the stator filing and nearly welding to the flywheel, but as it turns out I now believe its something to do with the top crank bearing, or related parts. All our attempts failed and on the second day of racing, we couldn't even get it to the start line before it died again.
But still WOW, yes this is the most crazy kind of racing I've done and so much more exciting than track days etc I've done in the past. We think we have already located a newer and more reliable engine for 2016, as they say, to finish first, first you must finish!!
And with that I have thrown together a little video of our adventures this weekend.