Those of you who managed to make it had a great meeting.It was the first time the superhistorics had been formally listed in the programme as a class, and as mentioned earlier, included a few F5000s. As leaders in the rolling starts the F5000s might need to study the Manual a bit more, to allow the field to form properly.
The maximum speed for rolling starts is 100kph not 100mph! Spacing is 3 car lengths not 10. Lyall Zohs (Swift DB4) says he had to pedal quite hard on the form-up lap. As expected, the F5000s cleared off, and only started lapping tailenders after 6 laps or so. Since the races were 8 laps, extra care was expected (and taken) with lapping.
Some of the sports-racers requested joining the back of our grids (you will remember our earlier discussions on this), and after a quick check around with drivers there was unanimous approval. One of the sports-racers (Robert Hulme) was circulating in the sub 60-sec bracket.
Ther were the usual opening-event retirements, including Grant Martin (DNS Swift BD4, sparks) and Roger Dowe (Lotus 69, DNF, sparks), but the crowd and commentator seemed to be quite happy. Both the commentator and local press described superhistorics as “the feature race of the meeting”, and in this respect the presence of 3 or 4 F5000s did us no harm at all.
A side-aspect of the sparks issue, is that several of us, including Grant, have found that modern distributor rotors seem less able to handle high voltage coil ignitions than older bakelite ones.We have seen holes punched right through from top to bottom and will now carry several spares. Under high cylinder-pressures(full throttle under load), spark resistance is high, and insulation fails.
