Tuesday 19 January 2010

London Motorsport Show at Brands Hatch

This is what I call a motorsport show. Do it at a race track, friends. You might just get to go for a hell-raising drive. The show goes on over a weekend, every November.
This car (below) is the one I took a passenger ride in. I'll try to upload the MP3 of it, because its raucous and noisy, but here a pic (got a prob with video upload) of the car in the pits.


JP2 sports racer, used by the racing school at Brands, with a 3.5 litre V6 running on natural gas.

There were other cars you could pay to ride in, like BMW coupes, and an MR2 and some others you go out in, if you could blag your way into it. I was about to go out in a Porsche 968, one of my favourites, driven by a driver named Demetriou, who's making a name for himself in club racing (he was mentioned in Autosport, I think) but then the period ended, and I had to get out.
SOON
Anyway, I had already ridden in the best car that was freely available. So, I didn't try anything else.

It was one of the fastest cars of the day, but seemed slower than the Radical sports racers. Watch turn one (below). (Recordings are showing other folks, not me.)

Sports racer on-board camera
Try to imagine the dip after turn 1 (Paddock Hill Bend)! Your stomach sinks. You wonder how the car sticks to the track (watch from 4:40). We used the Indy Circuit (the red track at 0:30), which is different after turn 3. The Indy doesn't give you much time to think.
(watch the slow-mo instructions from 1:37).
full tilt- brake-turn-full gas downhill/uphill-brake-turn-gas downhill-brake-turn left, etc.
not to mention the gear changes.
3 turns in about 15 seconds.

I drove a Renault Megane Sport (like the one below) at Brands, a couple of years ago, to do my ARDS test. Check race videos to see how people take the first right turn, before going into the dip. I scared my tester by driving so far to the left, in the braking zone, that I had part of the left tire off the asphalt (in mid-air essentially). Remember, the cars over here have the tiller on the right, or ass-backwards, by my estimation.
The tester said "maybe you should find a left-hand drive car". This video shows the Renault going through Turn 2 (Druids) down the next hill to Turn 3 (Graham Hill).
SOON
-Cosine67~~~