RACE REPORT: Cadwell Park Hot Hatch

Originally posted 09/07/2023 on https://patreon.com/dannydc2

This weekend saw a return to Cadwell Park for the 4th round of the 750mc Hot Hatch Championship. Feeling pretty competitive following my double win at Mallory, and being ‘back home’ at Cadwell, I was feeling fairly confident.

I decided to test on the Friday and glad I did. The car was awful in the first session. I’d made some changes in the week which I’ll talk more about in a video, but the end result was the front ride height was about 4mm higher than it should have been.

4mm surely can’t make that much difference?! I’ll tell you for free (despite you paying to read this), it made a HUGE difference. My best lap time in the morning was a 1:39.9, but the car felt horrendous. The next 2 sessions I did 1:38.3s, and with some minor damping changes finished the day with a lap-record-beating 1:37.5.

Successful test day. I did the usual checks post testing including checking the car, and decided to throw it on the weighbridge. A slight issue appeared. I was 15kg underweight. Only I wasn’t 15kg underweight as I’ve made no changes to the car that weighed 1110kg at Mallory Park.

I decided to put my spare ballast in to save some disputes in the morning, and ran a bit more fuel, adding around 12kg to the car in total. In hindsight I did not need to do this, but I didn’t want to risk a DQ and have to faff about arguing with folk.

Anyway the next day, we were first out on qualifying. 6 laps in, I was the only car in the 1:37s and on pole by nearly 2s, when I started to feel my engine slow down.

It felt like the car had about 80% power, as though the throttle cable was stuck, or had developed an air leak / not getting enough fuel. Just when I was trying to figure out what was going on it let go with a bang into turn 1.

Big plume of smoke out the exhaust, engine died, power steering went off. I knew what had happened. Pulled off at the next marshal post but the session got red flagged. I’d dropped oil all the way into coppice. I was quite lucky to not crash myself as I slipped on my own oil. It looks like nothing on the video of course!

Anyway the recovery team ended up being fans of the channel so that was cool. Got them on the GoPro. We got the car back and called a few local people about engines but nothing came up. The only option was the DC2 engine. Same spec as the one from the EG but a slightly later model, that was built at least 4 years ago and has never been run.

A lot of you think I’m local to Cadwell but unfortunately not. Luckily Hosh was here in his autobahn storming 330d (with the usual mods..) so we were able to turn a 4 hour round trip into a 3 hour one. The secret ingredient is crime.

I called up Ed on the way, he’d just got back from a week working away and at 10am was still in bed resting. He got up and went to the unit to start stripping the engine. By the time we got there the engine was waiting for us. All we had to do was remove the gearbox and fix a couple of small things and we were on our way. He even went and got us some breakfast sandwiches. Top lad.

Me and Hosh returned to Cadwell about 2:30pm, I’d missed the first race but the second one was due to start at 5:30pm…. only the circuit decided to pull the timetable forward by 40 minutes. We still had enough time but I was going to be close. Removing an engine is much easier than installing one, especially when the pits at Cadwell this weekend is on the grass!

Long story short we got it done with about 5 minutes to spare. I arrived in the assembly area and parked up at the back of the grid. Due to missing the first race I had to start at the back. There was only one option, drive fast and see what happens.

The race was one of the hardest drives I think I’ve ever done. There were a few teething issues with the car, it definitely wasn’t as fast as it was in the morning and the alignment was far from perfect. But I just got on with it. From dead last I climbed and climbed and ended up finishing in 2nd place setting a new lap record on the way. In a car that was doing 4mph less down the back straight and fuel starving on a couple of corners and basically no alignment.

I was pretty chuffed with that and the mood between everyone was sort of surreal. Every person involved gave it everything. None of us are professionals, but we made it happen. The story is magical and should make for an awesome video.

The day unfortunately ended with some bad news. Without going too far into it my mum’s been quite ill lately and it got really bad this past week. I had the option on Wednesday to either go to the hospital and sit with her waiting for the inevitable, or come here to Cadwell. There’s no doubt in my mind what she would have wanted. But I found out that she died at 5pm. That would have been bang on the time we first started the Civic. Butterfly effect?

Anyway, sorry to end on that. But that’s the sort of day it was. Not since the days of partying and music festivals have I experience such highs and lows in one day. Qualified on pole, engine blew up. Replaced engine and got the lap record, lost my mother.

Once again thanks for supporting me on here, and sorry there’s no exclusive video today. I’ve started editing the E46 M3 race video but haven’t got close to finishing it mostly due to the above. I’ll hopefully find some time this week to get on with it and edit a few.

Take it easy