The First Track Day - Curborough Sprint Course

During the ordering process, and the build stage, I'd managed to gain contact with Nigel Pugh - he is on his second R500, and was one of the other (two?) people to build an R500 Duratec (he built his a fair while ago, and now has a factory built R500 in the F1 colours)....  We'd been speaking online for quite a while and we agreed it would be good to meet up, and what better place at a track day?  Curborough Sprint Course was the venue.

So we'd booked the date a couple of months ago, and having only received the car back less than two weeks ago - the pressure had been me on to get it up to the 500 mile run in point... I've been out in it a lot (as you'd expect) and in actual fact I'd driven it every day since I got it, until the weather forecast looked like rain (after a week or so), so I took my other car to the office (a 997 Carrera 2S)... Turns out that going from a weeks worth of R500 driving back to the 911 was somewhat of a shock - the 911 felt absolutely massive, as though the steering was really light and very wallowy in comparison... Now, I'm not saying the 911 is a bad car - not by any stretch, but it just goes to compliment how excellent the R500 is to drive.

Anyway - too much digressing...
The car hit the 500 miles on M6 on the way up to meet Nigel - so it was run in..!  Happy days, and time to give it the full beans at the track...  We arrived at the circuit around 11am and Nigel being a bit of a regular round Curborough, had the lap record... Needless to say, there was only one thing on my agenda for the day!

My Caterham R500 at Curborough Sprint Course

In the queue for a run - Nigel Pugh's R500 in front of supercharged Z4M

So the day started with a couple of slow(ish) runs... Then I got bombarded with 'can I have a passenger ride?' which I obliged with for a while, but then wanted to get my laptimes down, so got to the stage where I had to tell people 'yes... later'  Anyway... the times gradually came down, and down and in the end - the lap record was mine!  1:20.3..! Well happy, and about 1.5 secs quicker than Nigel's old record - what added to the sweetness was it was my first track day in the R500, and also my first time at Curborough.  The event was run by a chap called Dan and his team - a link to their site is here http://www.sprintandtrackday.co.uk and I'd highly recommend a visit when they're running the event, as it was a really good day (especially if you have an R500 :-))

I think this is the lap record video, and the only reason I say 'think' is that there are a lot of videos from the day, and I'm pretty sure this is the right one:-

A short while after setting the lap record a guy came up to me (who I took for a passenger ride earlier in the day) and said... "Can you take my girlfriend's mum out for a passenger ride?" I was like.. "erm... yeah I guess so, so long as I can video her" that was agreed, and here is the video - which I think is absolutely hilarious:-

And to finish it off, here is the collection of todays onboard videos... Hope you enjoy them half as much as I did:-