Scott Malvern: Postcard from Germany!
July 27, 2012
I’ve been trying hard over the last few days to find the time to write this blog but as usual I’ve been rushing around non-stop. I was up before 4am this morning to catch an early flight from Gatwick to Cologne and now it’s evening and I’m in my hotel which is literally trackside at the Nurburgring. I’ll be assisting Ryan Cullen and my friends at Jamun Racing in the Formula Ford EuroCup event this weekend. I’d also love to have a look at the legendary Nordschleife if I get any spare time!
It was certainly an eventful last weekend at Croft in the Protyre Formula Renault BARC Championship and whilst on paper it may not look like a particularly good result for us, when you look at all the circumstances surrounding it actually didn’t turn out too bad at all. In fact for a while I wasn’t even sure that I would be driving at Croft at all.
Unfortunately a few days before the weekend we parted company with Cliff Dempsey Racing so we virtually ran the car ourselves with some very welcome and valuable help from some of my old friends from Jamun Racing, with the race entry going in under the banner of Cullen Motorsport. I’d really like to thank Patrick Cullen for pulling out all the stops for me and for all is help to date this season. I’d also like to thank Cliff Dempsey Racing for all their hard work in the first half of the season and I was pleased to see that they were able to secure the services of James Theodore last weekend.
As I’d never raced at Croft before we knew that we would be up against it this weekend as I had just the 15 minute warm up to get to grips with the circuit, and even this was cut a little short because of Seb Morris’ unfortunate accident.
We had a small problem in the first qualifying session and that limited our running somewhat, although we were in 2nd place when the red flags were deployed with less than 10 minutes left. Unfortunately the track must have become a little quicker later on as I watched my qualifying position tumble from 2nd to 5th in the last couple of laps before the session ended. We did get out for one final lap to try improve our time right at the last knockings but unfortunately there was a second red flag so that was that.
For qualifying session two we were in much better shape and up to third. We then set a lap time late in the session that our data told us would have set pole position. Unfortunately I was just metres from the start finish timing beam when the red flags were again deployed so the lap didn’t count and I had to settle for third. We spent the rest of Saturday removing the differential, which the officials kindly asked for an inspection of, scuppering any hopes of an early finish!
I made a decent start in race one, which was held early on Sunday afternoon, but was unable to get past Seb Morris who in turn was trying to move forward. I did pass him around the outside near the end of lap three but Walsh decided to try to follow through and there was a coming together between him and Morris which just caught my offside rear, putting a cut into my tyre. I was able to continue ok but the incident had slightly delayed me and I had a lot of ground to make up on third placed James Fletcher and 2nd placed Kieron Vernon. I worked very hard to bridge the gap and by the end of the race was right on Fletcher but we’d run out of laps. I had a look at the inside of Fletcher at the hairpin going up to the chequered flag but just couldn’t get alongside.
