Our first event for 2 years didn't start well.  The fact that this was a car that had never been raced before, strapped onto a hired trailer that we had never used before, towed by a car that had never been used to tow before, and going to an event organised by a club that we're not actually member of...was maybe a hint that things would not go too well.

Just collecting the trailer Dominic managed to swing the larger than usual 500kg object around a tight corner and into some chaps Toyota fortunately only resulting in a scratch.  The morning of the event our foot pump disintegrated followed by the air compressor, leaving the XR2 with completely flat tyres.  A trip via somewhere that sold pumps was now required but this was not enough bad luck as we got halfway out of town before we realised that we had forgotten all the paperwork for the event.

Eventually we got our act together and survived the trip down to Lydden with no further drama.  Signing on and scruitineering went well and qualifying then occurred after a very civilised break.

Qualifying was a bit of a shock to the system as Dominic struggled with tyres that refused to grip after being unused for 2 years.  Being buzzed by some rather fast Mini's it was clear that something special was needed to get a decent lap time.  Eventually Dominic recorded a best lap of 54.749 seconds to start in a 18th position in the first race.

Race 1 was fairly uneventful apart from the crash between a couple of cars at the hairpin which caused the red flags to be deployed within just 2 laps.  After the restart Dominic got on with the job of improving the lap times and testing the car and although never managing to catch up the rest of the he did improve the lap time  to 53.327 seconds and finished in 12th spot.

For race 2 we lowered the tyre pressures to attempt to get a bit more traction as the car was suffering from quite a bit of understeer, also Dominic decided to raise the rev limit and see how the engine coped.  Again the race was uneventful for us but we gained some useful testing time and further improved the times now down to 52.582 seconds - just a second off the car in front and also 1 second off our best ever time at the circuit which last time was done with a proper race engine!