Goodwood circuit is always a superb meeting and the circuit has a find blend of challenges from a driver’s perspective that you just don’t find anywhere else. We where to be running the Corvette Stingray (1965) in the prestigious RAC TT Celebration race on Sunday.
My partner this year was Steve Soper a great hero of mine so I was really looking forward to hearing what he thought of the car and any likely improvements that could be made. In this regard Steve was very complimentary and said the car felt great when he went out to practise.
The car has just under 600 bhp so it takes an experienced hand like to Steve to master the challenges of this particular Corvette. We managed to post the highest top speed down the back straight hitting 153 mph!
The car is more tricky coming up to braking areas and corners where feeding in that much power takes time and experience in the car to fully master. This year I asked Mike Adams from Adams Group and his team who support our marketing on Sub Zero and Wolf products to come and make a short film on our race day at Goodwood to give an inside track on how the day unfolded. Mike has also raced at Goodwood and knows the challenges from a driver’s perspective. The film will be going live in the near future on the website and hopefully give motorsport fans an inside track in the day of a race team at the glorious Goodwood Revival meeting.
We qualified 16th so about half way down the grid but felt there was more to come from the car and drivers in the race, which is exactly how things turned out fortunately. For anyone not familiar with the main race of the meeting the RAC TT Celebration two driver race the quality of the drivers participating is awesome containing not just Le Mans winners past and present but also current touring car drivers and also a couple of current crop F1 drivers including Brendan Hartley no less and Karin Chandhok who’s now gone on to be a great commentator on F1. You are very aware of the quality of drivers participating in this race.
We had a great run and I managed to move the car up to 7th place during my stint and came in just before the safety car was called out which was perfect timing. Unfortunately we were held up once Steve was in the car in the pit lane and this definitely cost us some valuable time as we couldn’t get back on to the circuit as there was a slight build up of cars in the pit lane at a crucial time. Steve had a great run and we finished 11th overall but we felt that we can improve on this result in the future if we are hopefully invited to participate in 2020.
The team did a great job with the car preparation and Jake and his team had worked extremely hard to ensure the car was on the button. I would like to thank Steve Soper and to drive with one of my all time heroes was a great and special privilege. Thanks Steve!