Teeside Driftcup

Prologue

With the car running perfectly during round 3 at Three Sister there was nothing repair, which is a first for Walton Motorsport. With no damage to repair we decided to improve upon the door bars of the roll cage with a conversion from the traditional X style to nascar door bars giving the driver more elbow room when moving quickly from lock to lock. With the new and improved door bars complete the dashboard was looking rather shabby but this was easily resolved with some flocking from Steve “stiggy” Evans. Now that the interior was looking refreshed Mike decided to take the car on a practice day at Rockingham in preparation for Drift Cup Rd 4 at Teeside. Mikes tutor for the day would be Matt Carter of Team Japspeed, with some pointers from Matt, Mikes driving was improving until disaster struck, a drift train resulted in Mike heading straight into the side of a E36 BMW ending the practice day prematurely.

The damage repairs to the S13 began with straightening the bent chassis legs, luckily as the suspension turrets are reinforced from the roll cage they remained true, once the chassis legs were back to their original location work could start fitting the spare radiator and intercooler. The next point attention to finish off the crash repairs would be to remake the tubular front end and get the new body panels fitted back to look as it did previously and ready for the next drift cup event that weekend.

The Event

Practice was underway on Saturday Morning on the smaller West Track at Teeside Autodrome, Mike headed out and quickly got into the swing of things on the tricky course, Putting in great practice runs Mike was feeling confident for qualifying in the warm weather we were unusually having, Out for the first qualifying run and Mike came past clip 2 at nearly 90degrees, straight away we knew there was an issue as he went into clip 3 and nearly spun. Talking after the run we concluded that with the weather cooling down since practice, a long wait between practice and qualifying and the fact that a quiet and well organised practice session had resulted in almost continuous laps meant that the rear tyres had cooled down considerable from their sticky practice state reducing grip levels significantly. A drop in tyre pressure was needed for qualifying run 2. Out on run 2 and Mike came through clip 2 again with huge angle but managed to hold together a run with a little clip of the tyre wall at the final clip. Was it enough to get into the top 32 though? During the briefing the results were read out and as they got to around qualification place 28 we thought Mike was out, but then we heard “23rd place Mike Walton”

Mike was a little concerned for top 32 battles as he Walton Motorsport S13 has just under 500 horsepower and quite a large amount of mechanical grip. The Problem was that Mike had to carry a lot of speed in order to be able to get round the final hairpin and up the hill to the clipping point. This will not be easy following a slower car. Which unfortunately was to be the case today in the shape of Kynne Obrien in his S13. The first battle was so close it went one more time, which is becoming a regular occurrence with Mike and Drift Cup, But sadly Mike just couldn’t pull it together to beat Kynne and lost out in the top 32.

Bring on Driftland for the Finale!