Friday evening and guess what?

Well done! we're at the track! The closure of the south side of the M25 and the road works on the north side had made for a rather tiring journey to sunny Stratford-Upon-Avon, but the warm evening made it a pleasure to pitch camp and settle ourselves in for another weekend of fun and frolics with the Wild Bunch.

These pits ain't big enough for the both of us... well okay, yes they are..

We ran two more passes through the afternoon ,another lap in the left hand lane with a very out of shape 13.0 and a final shot down the right hand lane, still alternating between views of the wall and the centre line to end on an 11.0.

Yes Dean.... very interesting... yawn...

The view from the cockpit...

Fumble fingers...

Saturday morning arrived with more splendid weather and we readied ourselves for a day of testing 'n' tuning. We got the Belle ready and strapped Helen into her "sweat suit". We headed down to the track at about quarter to eleven and ran 9.88 @ 134mph this was pretty much on form from the last time we raced, 3 weeks earlier at the American Car World Nationals.

As the sun came overhead we headed out again but this time the Belle lost traction around the 300ft mark and Helen had to correct and lift slightly, slowing to an 11.94. It looked like the combination of the heat of the day and the treaded tyres running down the track was leaving the Belle with marginal grip. We've noticed in the past that our girl can be tempramental sometimes and when the we have marginal conditions our combination can leave us struggling.

Oh no! Where's the purple brolly?

The day had given us the opportunity to try out a new toy, in the shape of a small digital video camera. We mounted this to the roll cage and managed to grab some footage of a couple of the passes. Click the link below to ride with The Belle.

Ride with The Belle

You may need Microsoft's Media Player version 10 to view the file. (download FREE from Microsoft)

Sunday proved to be just as big a challenge, we dialled in a 9.88 for the day and got off to a not too good 10.18 Unfortunately we were still struggling for traction and found ourselves performing way off the mark. As the day progressed Helen clocked a 11.10, followed by a 13.22 and a 10.72, fighting on every pass.

At the end of the day we joined 10 out of the 20 Wild Bunch cars that had started the weekend  in completing the four passes on Sunday. It had been a very hot weekend , but we'd stuck with it, Helen had shown she knows how to handle the car and we managed to get some new video at the same time, so not a bad weekend after all!