Conor Daly – Testing Day 1

Brands Hatch (October 14, 2008) – Today was the first day of driving in our long journey. We started early getting up at 7:15am and going to the hotel restaurant and having a very nice breakfast! We were ready to go when we arrived at the track. It was very cold however, which was somewhat unfortunate, but it’s England and it wasn’t raining so we couldn’t complain!
We started practice at 9:30am. There were many Duratec Fords going out on track with us but only one other Kent FF1600. The first time through Paddock Hill Bend was really impressive. I was so surprised at the steepness of the descent! As I built more speed up going through the corner I started using the outside curb. The car kept bottoming out badly though and I didn’t know why – I couldn’t really see a bump in the curb. I came in when the session was over and asked some questions about it. It turns out that there is a line that goes right around the bump. The next session I used this line and it worked perfectly.
The rest of the track was also quite fun. Druid’s was a very interesting hairpin because it was very long corner. Kidney and Clearways were the next challenging corners. You have to enter Kidney late enough to try and get as straight a line as possible through the corner to enter Clearways the right way. Clearways is a high entry speed corner. You have to carry a lot of speed in and around the corner. It is the most important corner on the track because it leads onto the long front straight.
At the end of the day everyone was pretty satisfied with our performances. I had a bit of an engine issue all day which was costing time but we only wanted track time today so we didn’t bother changing it until the end of the day. So we left the track very satisfied but with a lot more to learn tomorrow! We are going to learn a lot because it is going to be sopping wet! Welcome to England I guess…