Steve and Carole will be sharing the 1.6L EcoBoost powered SBD Westfield

Steve: 3rd Overall, 1st in Class – 91.29s
Carole: 2nd in Class – 102.57s

Steve & Carole were driving the Westfield for the first time since its rebuild (from Steve incident)! Zoe had driven it at Lydden and said the car was significantly easier to drive and could do with some more power. Steve had adjusted all the boost control maps especially for Abingdon. For those who don’t know, Abingdon is effectively 2 sprints in one day. Half the field do the Abingdon course in the morning and the other half of the field do the Bentley course in the morning, then they switch around for the afternoon, then the times are added together to give the overall time. There were 120 competitors which meant the turnaround was extremely fast, especially when double driving. Carole went first in practice and said the car felt quick and quick different from driving her OMS, Steve went second and with the high temperatures, it was already very warm. The two sprints are quite different, the Bentley Sprint first is very much acceleration bursts between 90-deg turns, The Westfield is normally very quick at this and quite often can be on the times of the single seaters. Unfortunately, we were getting a misfire and Steve thinks he tracked it down to a piece of damaged wire that had been overlooked during the rebuild, unfortunately we were unable to fix it and could only reduce the symptoms if we reduced the boost. Unfortunately, it took the whole morning to make the car drive well enough to be comfortable. We still put in some reasonable times but quite a way behind the single seaters.

When we swapped over sprints for the afternoon, which means we were on the much faster sweeping Abingdon circuit where normally we can’t stay with the single seaters, Steve managed to get comfortable in the car and slide the car around quite a lot and make the most of the reduced boost that we could. Carole was not as comfortable with sliding the car around as she is used to the more planted feel of her OMS. By the middle of the afternoon, the cars were turning round so fast due to the smooth running and organisation of the event, but the time the second driver had finished their run, they would stay in the car for probably no more than 5 mins then go up to take their next run. In fact on the final timed run, Steve had been looking at how to improve the low speed response out of the chicane and decided to enable the anti-lag which had only been used on the rally cars, which have a far more advanced system. He wasn’t sure how it would work without all the extra accessories not being fitted, it worked surprisingly well significantly improving the throttle response and allowed Steve to drift the rear end of the car even at high speed and he knocked 2 seconds of his previous time, which allowed him to be only a second behind Simon Wallis who got FTD. At the end of the day, the 2 sprint times are added together and we were really pleased to finish 3rd overall. Steve and Carole finished 1st and 2nd in class.