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It is a few years since the Porsche 924 Championship raced at Rockingham, and few of the current crop of drivers know the track. Will Penrose was one of the few to have raced there before and duly took pole position….despite having a wheel work loose in the latter stages of the session. The left handed track poses handling problems, with the transition to the banking in particular causing tyre degradation and loss of grip after a couple of laps running. In the race this caused more than a few drivers to fade away later in the race and one or two to lose control completely.
At the start of the race Will Penrose got away cleanly and headed into a lead he was never to lose. Behind him, many of the cars were scrabbling for grip and making slow, wheel spinning getaways. Nico Ferrari and Matt Upchurch were locked together for the whole race in a tight but clean battle which nevertheless allowed Will to make his getaway. In the end it was Nico who just squeezed home in second a bare third of a second ahead of Matt.
Behind the front three, Andrew Hannington and Steve Brown both had disastrous starts and fell way down the order, only to fight their way back up the field through the race, to finish more or less where they qualified. Both agreed that the grid order might have been restored had the race been a lap longer. As it was, Andrew came home ahead. Seb Ferrari had an eventful race. Qualifying in ninth he at one point managed to get himself up to fifth place before tangling with Paul Crawford on lap six which sent him spinning down the order and he came in last of the finishers. Mark Marshall kept it under control for the entire race, but then lost it on the last lap and was trapped in the gravel as the race ended. The only person with a worse tale to tell was Vanessa Flegg, whose race day began badly with a misfire during qualifying and got worse in the race when the bonnet came open on the first lap.
The next meeting is at Brands Hatch at the end of May where I am sure everyone will be keen to renew the contest. |
