Brin Kinch: Anglesey brought it hard, and it hurt my feelings
What a weekend to remember, for all the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite get my head into the weekend, and I gave myself a whole host of issues. Friday practice was the first time I had seen the track, and it took me a good few sessions to get back into things and settle into the car, and the afternoon sessions gave me a lot to work on with pace being a key issue. I knew after the day had finished that I had a task on my hands to try and bring myself up to speed for qualifying the next day.
Saturday qualifying turned out to be a slow disaster, as I convinced myself that the car had brake issues which completely ruined my pace and I ended up qualifying at the back. Self-sabotaging my own qualifying is definitely a lesson learnt. Then the first race came about 5 hours later, and just before the cars were rolling out of the assembly area to go to the grid, my car wouldn’t fire up. The team were frantically trying their best to fix the issue, with Andy sprinting back to the truck to get a spare distributor cap & spark plug leads, but sadly the team couldn’t get her running in time. It turned out to be a fuel pump failure but unfortunately that was an early end to my first day.
The first race of Sunday was ruined by a silly mistake. I thought a good night’s sleep and a romantic morning walk on the beach with my teammates would help ease my mentality into the next two races, but unfortunately I was wrong. The first race came around and I was starting last due to my DNS the day before. I got away quite well from the grid when the lights went out, but when the third corner came around, I didn’t foresee the crowd of braking cars in front of me and I braked too late, ending in myself spinning backwards into the cars in front and losing a rear corner. More self-sabotage. Thankfully the mechanics did an astounding job to get her fixed in time for the second race, which I was determined to not result in more clangers.
I started at the back again and got a decent start, but I couldn’t find the pace within myself to keep with the pack I was in, and found myself with some free space around me on my own, desperately trying to have a clean race and learn more from the track itself. I ended up finishing last for that race, but I was thankful I didn’t break any more parts, or spirits of the mechanics.
I ended up coming away from Anglesey with a bruised ego, a lot of handmade fudge, but with a lot learned from the weekend.
Special thanks to Andy, Matty, Bruce and the Ammonite team for fixing the car when I kept breaking it.
- Brin Kinch