Goodwood International Final 2022

The Build-up

We have had a brilliant season of racing, competing in the Croft and Blyton Park heats of the F24 and F24+ competitions. With the success of our Croft race (1st place kit car in both categories), we were invited to compete in the international final at Goodwood.

The race was on! We had a few weeks to prepare the cars and get ready to compete. We had a number of upgrades we wanted to fit following the heats, which should have put us in fighting contention for an award but, as is often the case, things didn’t quite go to plan.

A small fire on one of our new telemetry PCBs ended our upgrade hopes in a flash of smoke. While we’d normally like to say it wasn’t anybody’s fault, unfortunately the blame lay solely at Mr Jesper’s door! As it turns out, applying 24V to GND and GND to 24V is not the best idea.

We managed to get the cars ready and loaded into the van, ready for the 8 hour journey from the North-East to the south coast. After a couple of pit-stops, we arrived at the Youth Hostel we would call home for three days.

Race Day

Sunday was the big day. We made our way across the coast ready for a day of racing. Due to some small delays, we arrived later than we’d have liked which meant the pressure was on to get scrutineered and out in time for practice.

Unfortunately the scrutineers highlighted some issues with our cars – namely the brakes and our new nose cone. Brakes have been a recurring issue for us as they seem to regularly slacken over time, but it’s nothing a few minutes with a spanner couldn’t fix. The nose cone on the other hand would prove more difficult as the data sheet for the expanding foam didn’t explicitly state the compressive strength. After some ferocious Googling, we were able to confirm the specification we had found when choosing our foam, and thus scrutineering was passed – unfortunately not in time for practice!

We found ourselves on the grid completely blind, with no data to support us in gear choice or racing theory – an unfortunate situation to be in. The first F24 race was decided to be a ‘feeler’, working out how fast we would be compared to the competition and how competitive we could be in the standings. This was when we realised that our current car setup was no match for the top kit cars on track.

Mr Jesper made an executive decision – we would not be targeting a placed finish this year. Instead, all of our students were going to get a lap of Goodwood – a bucket list item for most, I’m sure! 14 pit-stops over two races later and all of the F24 team had driven their laps, resulting in an overall best finish of 38th of 45. However in search of a silver lining, we were please to see we placed higher than teams that beat us at Blyton Park!

With the F24+ race we were in a slightly better position. We know our car is capable of high place finishes with its current setup and so it was down to the driver to make it work. After a mostly uneventful race, notwithstanding some questionable driving from a couple of other cars, we managed to place 5th of 13.

Overall, the event was a fantastic success. We all had a brilliant time and owe a massive thank you to all at Greenpower for putting on a fantastic season!

Silverstone

With the long drive home on Monday looming, we had one more treat to look forward to – a visit to the Silverstone Interactive Museum. Having last been to Silverstone for the 2019 International Final, it was great to be back! The tour was fantastic and beautifully showed the history of the circuit and the motoring associated with it. While some found the highlight to be the gift shop (which, admittedly, was rather good), for most it was the tour of the Silverstone track including the Sir Lewis mural and a rather special on-track surprise. It just so happened that Aston Martin were out on track testing their new (1 of 15) Valkyrie Pro race car, driven by none other than Niko Hulkenberg! Call it luck, or perfect planning by Mr Jesper, we got to watch the cars first ever laps on British soil – what a day!

And with that, it was back to Hexham. We would like to say a massive thank you to all of our sponsors, without whom the club would not be able to run. Another thank you to Dave and Rowell Coaches for taking us to the event in style!

We will be back in force next season…watch this space!