Geri tests at Rye House
22nd April:
Good Friday, as good a day to go testing as any. And we weren't alone in our thinking, we arrived at Rye House to find that the paddock area was more crowded than on any non-race weekend test we haqve attended before. We had planned to try a few things during the day, first we had to deal with the weather on what was to prove the hottest Easter ever (apparently).
We gpt out early to get a few laps in on a free session, so there were adults and juniors out on track in much faster karts than the Cadet karts. Geri usually takes forever to get back done to speed, but he was into the 44s by lap 6 - see tables below.
At 10:00am it was decided to divide up into sessions of approximately 20 minutes, adults, then Juniors and then Cadets, so we had a 40 minute break before the first Cadet only session. There were about 6 to 8 Cadet karts on track at any time, a couple of them were Comers and a wild card was a little 8 year old in his first ever track session. He drove round very slowly and very cautiously, but to be fair to him, he seemed to keep out of the way of the other Cadets despite lapping almost 30 seconds a lap slower!
Prior to this test session, Geri's best lap round the circuit was 43.64 last time (5th April) during the Honda Cadet final. It just just seven laps of this session for Geri to set a new personal best (PB) of 43.43, 10 laps later a new PB of 43.36 and by the end of the session Geri had run 6 laps at or below his previous PB.
We upped the tyre pressures a little, the previous session had recorded a big increase in pressure on the nearside rear while the others remained fairly constant. A small improvement on PB finally arrived on the 28th lap (43.25) on a long and tiring session but by now Geri was running most laps in the 43s.
Time for a bigger change, Geri's revs were reaching above 5900 while on most laps the minimum was up above 3000. This was running a 76 tooth sprocket, so we tried a 75 tooth one to see what difference it made - in theory while acceleration might suffer a little, Geri would hit higher top speed so long as he kept his cornering speed up. Early laps didn't look to be much different than in the previous session, things were looking inconclusive - but then Geri got the hang of coming out of the slow corners better. Confidence was up and he also pulled a couple of audacious overtaking moves through the final corner. Lap 10 was the first of 4 consecutive laps where Geri lowered his PB (43.21 - 43.20 - 43.17 - 43.14) and the next 3 laps meant his fastest 7 laps ever had come consecutively.
The final change came for the last session. We moved the seat backrest back a little, Geri keeps growing while we are not looking. We also found 2kg ballast under the seat we didn't know was there so we removed that as well. We may have to replace 1kg before the next round to keep him safely above minimum weight, but we'll check that next week. Geri was still getting quicker - his PB lowered to 43.01 on lap 9 and finally broke into the 42s with a 42.99 3 laps later. In the final 3 sessions Geri put in 50 laps better than his PB before today! We now have higher hopes that he will be more competitive next week although there is a long way to go before he will be top ten material.
Download Geri's lap times for the day.
Download table showing Geri's top three laps per session along with their minimum and maximum engine revs.
