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July 22/23 CROFT (Page 2)

In complete contrast to yesterday, it was cloudy with a cool wind for the qualifying day in the
eighth round of the Powertour National Saloon Cup. This was the second time this year that a
round of the competition had been held at this northern circuit.

The session started slightly earlier at 11.55 as the meeting had been reasonably trouble free in the morning. A new driver to the series was guest driving for the GR Ford Focus team. He was Gordon Shedden from Scotland and he currently leads the Ford Fiesta series that accompanies the BTCC tour. Two drivers, Tom Boardman and Desmond Smail, were absent, leaving twenty cars to contest the round.

Dave started well. His plan was to go out and try to get a reasonable time before coming back to the pits to change tyres so as to bed them in before tomorrow's race. Normally this would not be required but as Dave had flat spotted his tyres yesterday in the testing, it left the team no alternative. He did six laps and came in at the end of his seventh lap. In these six laps he managed to record a time 1m 32.945, bettering his previous best by 1.1 second! Even so, this still did not quite get him into the top ten; such is the quality of the opposition.

Kevin had a more torrid time. He was struggling for gears from the start and when he came into the pits after seven laps, he was unable to get the Civic back into gear and had to retire from the qualifying session. He finished back in twentieth place. The problem was with the gear selection mechanism, which meant the gearbox had to be dropped out of the car in order to fix the fault before tomorrow's race.

When Dave went back out after the pit stop he found that the tyre change had unbalanced the car. He had three spins in his final five laps and, needless to say, he failed to improve his time any further and finished up eleventh on the grid.