Robinson: Showtime
After a couple of private tests in the Radon, this was it... finally a chance to see how the car stacked up to more established chassis such as the Van Diemen and RFR. We also took the opportunity at the Winter Exhibition to learn as much as we could about the new tires that are being introduced for this year, as we had not run on them prior to this event.
We started the first session off on Thursday with a bang (literally) as we had an engine let go a lap and a half into the first session. Definitely not a great way to start off a weekend, but fortunately, a fellow Radon owner, Jim Hanrahan was kind enough to let us use his car (pictured) for the weekend.
Even though the car didn't have a blue printed engine or gearbox, it would allow us to gauge the performance of the chassis compared to the competition, which is what we were down there for.
Thankfully, we would able to run the last couple of sessions on Thursday in the back up car and then pretty much all of Friday without a hitch.
On Saturday, we would have the lone qualifying session and race of the event. I qualified P2 which was a solid effort. In the race, I was able to get a pretty good start and challenge for the lead, but we didn't quite have the pace to be a serious threat for the win, and I ended up second.
Overall, I think it was a pretty good weekend. We started off about 1.5 seconds off the pace and trimmed the gap to about .2 second. There is still a lot of work to be done to get to where we need to be, but it's a good start.
Written by Skylar Robinson