Oulton Park is a great technical circuit, its also 6 hours drive at least when towing on a Friday to get there from home. So this year with it being the first weekend in September I was able to take Eddie my youngest son with me (still on school holidays) and trek 7 hours to the circuit ready for race day Saturday. Dad was spending the week sightseeing so came along with his caravan in tow. I don’t begrudge the travel time given what the Scottish teams have to go through to race all year!

I didn’t make the cut for a garage this time so the gazebo made its first appearance for the year and good weather meant this was not an issue. The car all prepped we retired to Dads caravan to watch Dan Surridge and Paul Streather changing an engine in the paddock grateful to not have to be doing that!

Qualifying and the car felt good, took a lot of time to get heat in the rear tyres but 4 laps in they were gripping OK, then on the final lap of the session coming through Island bend the power steering was lost, then through Knickbrook a catastrophic loss of power and the bottom pulley had fallen off.

After being kindly recovered by the marshalls the situation was terminal, a borrowed pulley and bolt from Alex at 4G racing and a compression tester from Oli at preptech proved there was no compression and our weekend was disappointingly done! A long way to go to pay all that and do 15 minutes, and with a new job and no time I knew that Snettertion in 4 weeks was impossible to commit too at this time. So the end of the season for me with only three weekends out of six complete pretty woeful all round!