Super Production Cup - Yateley & Colchester

My family is a racing family. I met my wife racing RC cars, so we both actively race RC, as does my father-in-law. My daughter, although only 13 months old, is familiar with a transmitter and I expect she will be tagging allong with me at RC meetings in the future. With this in mind, I bought and built the M-05 as a car the family (my wife and I for now) could use and race.

SPC Yateley

The Super Production Cup (SPC) is a small but fun Championship for Mini cars such as the Tamiya M-05 and for F1 cars such as the Tamiya F103, F104, and 3Racing F109. There are 7 'double-header' rounds visiting several tracks in the Midlands & South/South-East of the UK. For more information check out the Super Production Cup website.

First round for the Keaveney family was Yateley in Hampshire, just a few miles south of Reading. For this round, we decided that my wife, Sara, would race as she had not raced in a long while due to giving birth to our daughter, Amelie. Practice on Saturday let Sara get used to the car, and it let me get the car's handling tuned to Saras' liking.

Sunday arrived, and the weather was fine throughout the day, so much so that I got sunburnt! Sara enjoyed racing again, and did herself proud by coming back to racing and qualifying herself into the A-Final. She raced competitively in both legs of the A-Final and finished 9th after some good close-quarters racing.

SPC Colchester

Colchester was the next SPC round, and this time it was my turn to try my hand at 2WD. Again I had the luxury of being able to go down to the track on Saturday - and I made full use of this to test both 55D Sweep MN25 tyres, and also 60D Tamiya S-Grip and M-Grip tyres. I found that although the 60D tyres gave me more speed, that the 55D Sweep tyres allowed me to corner much quicker, and my laptimes reflected this as my 55D laptimes were about 0.8 of a second quicker than my 60D laptimes.

Going into Sunday, I found myself in the same heat as a friend from the Cotswold Club, John Ridding. We raced together closely throughout qualifying, pushing each other to improve, with the result that we both qualified very close to overall TQ man, Andy Travis. At the end of 4 rounds of qualifying, there was only 2 seconds between Andy in TQ and me in 3rd, so we were well set for a good race in the two-leg A Final.

In the final then, I  ultimately did not perform to my potential - in the first leg I was took out from behind by 4th place at the start, and had to fight to regain 3rd after which any hopes of challenging Andy and John had long gone. In the second leg, I started much more strongly, keeping 2nd for a good while then maintaining a close third behind John Ridding. In the end though, I didn't quite have the pace of either John, or eventual winner Andy.

Still, it had been a thoroughly enjoyable meeting, and I learned some important lessons about Mini setup, and about what I wanted to change on the car to suit me. More on that later....