How do we feel..Happy & Pissed off
The biggest high (for me).....My best mate was unhurt:nod:
We arrived at Anglesey early saturday morning in anticipation of the weekend ahead of us. The weather was sunny and hot the coastal view awesome. We unloaded the car and set up in the garage.
The warm up session came around quickly and before we knew it Alan was getting readt to go out. We had discussed how he was going to run and the plan was I would hold him in the garage until the last car had left the pit lane. We wanted to give Alan a clear track so he could just focus on getting use to the car and circuit and generally give the car a bit of a shake down.
The session went well with no mishaps or signs of things to come.
Practice session:
Plan was again to follow the format of the warm up session.
Alan was sitting the car ready to go but when he went to start it...nothing..it wouldn't fire up and no matter what we tried it wouldn't start even with a push. In desparation we tried to jump start it off the spare battery we had and still nothing. So we pushed it out into the paddock to jump start it with the Frontera but still nothing. As a last ditched effort we swapped the batteries and tried jump starting it with the Frontera and YES it started.
Alan flew out the garage down the pitlane and out on track, by this time he onbly had enough time to get in 2 or 3 laps. Alan was piissed as hell at this point and we (Me and Wayne) could see this from the pit wall. He managed to get in 2 timed laps and took 2 secs off his time.
Qualifying..
Again we had trouble getting the car started but this time we got it started for the start of the session. However this time Alan only managed to get in an out lap. As started his first flying lap all looked well then he didn't come back around again but finally came into the pit lane slowly.
He had had a Big off at the top of the back straight....At about 120mph approaching the 2nd gear left hand bend, as he got on the brakes the backend stepped out straight on to the grass, throwing him into a 720 degree spin and hurtling straight for the marshalls tower.......(on video)
The video footage is both scarey and unbelievable.
Once he was back in the garage we started to check over the...... The only damage is a broken wing mirror caused by flying rocks. The bumper is stone chipped to feck, the paint has been stripped off the underside of the petrol tank and as we were to find out at our cost on sunday minor damage had been caused to a pipe in the engine bay.
The result of the off meant that this is how Alan finished qualifiying on sunday.
A cloud of smoke and...
Sundays report to follow.
