Race Report Round 3 BARC Mosport July 3rd - TQLA President Chris Haley

The BARC one day event at Mosport is now history and for the most part it went off quite well. The weather was good, there were no serious incidents to cause delays and BARC seemed to have everything well organized.

Race 1

We had 5 cars on hand for the weekend, Jim, Bob, Graham, Richard and Craig and everyone headed out for qualifying about 9:45 am. About an hour later we headed out for the first race with the finishing order in F4 being Jim, Bob, Graham, Richard and Craig. Unfortunately it was not as simple as it sounds,… if you had been watching you would think Bob and I hadn’t been to a race in months. Just as Bob was leaving the Paddock he stopped and got out of the car so I came back down from the Mock Grid to find out that he had forgotten to put in his ear plugs, and the crew had not asked the standard question as he came out of the trailer “got your ear plugs in?”. We got that sorted out but by the time he got to the mock grid the field was on the track and gone so we had to start from the Pit lane and they held us near the tower. Race starts, Bob creeps along the pit lane at 60kmph and by the time he gets to the track and up to speed the pack is long gone. Comes around the next lap, goes into turn 2 and the car skates away on him a bit for no apparent reason. As he looks up towards turn 3 the large plum of blue smoke gives a hint that maybe there is oil on the track and he confirmed this going into turn 5 with a perfect 360 spin . Seems that Craig Hall’s Yamaha decided to spill most of its internals on the track between 3 & 5 so that was the end of the day for him. Meanwhile Jim was steaming off into the distance followed by Graham, Richard & Bob. Bob managed to work his way by Richard and Graham and then on the last lap of the race the car got sideways again in Turn 2 due to a deflating right rear tire. Bob managed to nurse the car back to the pit land and finish the race there.

Race 2

We had a couple of hours break between race 1 and 2, then headed out on the track about 1:45pm for the second race. This time the 4 remaining cars in F4 all got to the grid on time without any fuss. This race turned into an excellent dual between Jim & Bob with both of them turning times in the mid to high 1:27’s and swapping the lead a few times during the race. Richard and Graham were a little further back having quite a battle of their own with a couple of the sports racers between them and the Jim and Bob battle. (Nick Majors and Mario Urbano had disappeared off into the distance in the lead). As we were coming up to the last lap, Jim was putting a great deal of pressure on Bob and from what I could see had gotten by him into Turn 1 and held that until coming out of Moss’s when he had a terminal engine failure. He coasted into the pit lane and as he rolled by where Terry Wilkinson and I were standing I noticed that there was an oil fire in the engine bay. We yelled at him to get out, Terry grabbed an extinguisher, pulled the pin, squeezed the handle and nothing! He quickly grabbed another, tried the same sequence and this time it worked but that was the end of the day for Jim. There was then a little bit of a delay while the track workers dumped a bunch of speedy dry up the back straight. Richard was 2nd and Graham was 3rd in F4.

Race 3

There was only an hour break before race 3 and we were now down to 3 cars. Also the FL grid that had been 12 cars at the start of the day was now down to 7 with our drop outs and the demise of 3 of the sports racers. Again, Nick Majors and Mario Urbano disappeared off into the distance but what we thought would be a quiet 3rd place run for Bob turned out to be anything but. Steve Scala in one of the older Formula Mazda cars came to life for this race and made Bob work for his 3rd place. Richard and Graham had a great race with Richard getting by Graham early in the going and opening up a sizeable advantage only to have Graham come to life in the later part of the race, catch Richard and work his way by in the last few laps. Graham was 2nd and Richard 3rd in F4. Both Graham’s and Richard’s cars ran extremely well this weekend with little or no problems and it was nice to see them enjoying a trouble free weekend.

Family Matters …..

On another enjoyable note, Michael Adams, Peter Barker’s grandson, ran his first CASC race this weekend in a FV. He took some time off from his busy karting schedule to try his hand at formula car racing and proved very quickly that he will be a force to be reckoned with when he does this full time, not matter what class it is. He qualified 7th out of 15 cars and completed all 3 races in very competitive form. He was 7th in race 1, 6th in race 2, 4th in race 3 and ran in 3rd for part of that race with a best time of 1:45.393 compared to the race winner of 1:44.928!! Great job Michael and congratulations to the Barker/Adams clan for keeping the talent tradition going.