Approaching Turn 3, the left-hander near the top of the hill, I tap the brakes to transfer the car’s mass forward over the front wheels, turn in and set the car up for the right-hander at Turn 4. At the last minute I realise I’m carrying a fraction too much speed so I’m still on the brakes as I flick the car to the right. By the time my brain has started to compute what’s happened, it’s too late – the rear has let go and I’m spinning through 270 degrees… And, to add insult to injury, I’m not fast enough on the clutch and the engine stalls, leaving me precariously parked perpendicular to the racing line.
Back in the pits at the end of the session, the car owner Emily Duggan pounced on me.
“So Lachy, I want you to tell me why you spun,” she said.
“I was still on the brakes as I turned into Turn 4,” I replied.
She pressed me further: “But why did you feel like you still needed to be on the brakes at that point?”
“Because I was carrying too much speed.”
“Correct, you came in too hot and that’s why you lost the rear… But at least you know where the limits are now!”
Earlier in the day I had arrived at Wakefield Park to take up Emily’s generous – and rather brave – invitation to test her Series X3 NSW Hyundai Excel race car. Despite the fact I had made a career out of talking about, writing about and promoting motorsport over more than a decade, I rocked up at the circuit with very little actual experience behind the wheel on a racetrack.
Yes, there had been the odd casual appearance, like my 2012 track day at Winton in Dave Stillwell’s left-hand-drive Mustang, with its non-adjustable driver’s seat set for Dave’s lanky frame which meant I couldn’t physically push the accelerator pedal beyond about half-way.
Or the embarrassing 2014 cameo in a regularity session aboard my Commodore road car, where I made the fatal mistake of tuning the radio into the commentary and being distracted by my co-announcers and their cheap shots at my performance.
There was also a guest drive of a VW Scirocco at a track day earlier this year, but that car had an automatic gearbox and a full suite of electronic driver aids, and I only drove it for a handful of laps.
So, it’s fair to say I wasn’t exactly confident about getting behind the wheel of Emily’s Excel.
The day started with a few laps in the passenger’s seat with Emily driving. I concentrated as hard as I could on her braking, turn-in and gear change points, and then it was my turn.
As the start of my first session approached, Emily commented on how nervous I looked.
And I was nervous. I was well and truly out of my comfort zone. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by being too slow, but at the same time I was very conscious of everything that could go wrong… especially after commentating several Excel roll-overs over the last couple of years. I was also very well aware that Emily would be racing the car the following weekend, so I needed to bring it back in one piece.
After two laps, the nervous feeling had evaporated completely. The car proved to be unbelievably easy to drive, and with Emily applauding and yelling words of encouragement from the passenger’s seat every time I nailed a corner, I soon started really enjoying myself.
Then something else happened. A competitive spark, which I don’t think I even knew existed, suddenly flared up. I found myself asking for information, looking at Emily’s in-car footage and working out where I needed to improve to go faster.
The brake booster, which had been connected for my first session, was removed for the rest of the day and I found I actually preferred it that way, as it gave me better feeling through the pedal.
I spent several more sessions in the car, some with Emily in the passenger’s seat and some on my own. I even found myself giving feedback to the race engineer, Matt Neill, after he made some tweaks to the Supashock dampers to try and smarten up the car’s handling.
“It feels a lot better on the initial turn-in phase through the low-speed corners,” I remember saying at one stage.
“Initial turn-in phase”???? Who did I think I was, a Supercar driver?
By the end of the day, the single spin at Turn 4 was the only blemish on my record and I had recorded an official best time of a 1:20.1 – certainly not race-winning pace in Series X3 NSW, but not back-of-the-grid material either. Considering my lack of experience, I was satisfied.
Or was I? After all, I was still more than three seconds slower than Emily’s best time of the day and as I went to bed that night, I found myself replaying laps over and over again in my head. What if I had braked a few metres later here? What if I had taken a slightly different line there?
I may not have quite accepted it yet, but now I understand what racing drivers mean when they talk about a motorsport addiction… And it’s something I look forward to feeding over the remainder of this year as I prepare for my first competitive event, the 24 Hours of Lemons in October.
Maybe a motorsport journalist, commentator and PR representative can become a racer after all…
Chequered Flag Chat 