The Welsh Championships: Day 1 was a case of ‘so far, so good’. We had decided to spend the morning testing different things; not really bothering that we were two or three tenths off of the pace. That was until someone put in a much quicker time that had both Junior and I wondering whether we had done the right thing! The fourth and final practice session was notable for my attempt to bring Junior in half-way through the 7-minute session to change onto our race tyres so that we could get a few laps on them (with a view to spending less time scrubbing-in during qualifying). I enlisted the help of another of the Llandow dads and his lad (thanks again to our good buddies, Lou and Ryan Edwards!): they had a wratchet gun; Junior and I were on T-bar sockets. As we all stood clear with our arms raised and Junior left the pits, I think we had lost 100 seconds: Not bad but I’m sure we could shave a few more seconds off! 😉

Qualifying went very well: Since we had been off the pace during practice, nobody wanted to follow us! Junior got his head down and put in some nice laps to bag pole position by 0.15s. Heat #1 went similarly well: A nice start, the next two drivers had an early tussle and Junior scooted clear; winning with a little in hand and the fastest lap to boot. Day 1 had been pretty much perfect 🙂

The Welsh Champs are unique in that they have qualifying on both Saturday and Sunday, along with a heat on each day: The combined points from those heats determine your pre-final grid position. Junior and I are definitely not the type of people to crack open the bubbly prematurely even if the forecast for tomorrow had been dry. Unfortunately, the forecast is far from dry 🙁 It isn’t that Junior is particularly poor in the wet, it’s just that his confidence is sky-high in dry conditions at the minute. When you’ve bagged pole and a heat win, you just want conditions to remain exactly the same. Our rivals will likely be doing rain dances tonight and, judging by the forecast, I’m not sure they’ll have to dance that hard.

Just this one time, *please* let us escape that shitty forecast, pleeeease!