Never-Lift

Well after spending months of fucking around with my e36 I finally got her on the road. Her first ever journey on the road in my ownership was straight to Donington Park’s Melbourne loop for the MoT (Mazda on Track) “Extreme entry” day. The day was just held on the Melbourne loop which is essentially an 80mph run-up into a 2^nd gear hairpin right, but for the £40 it cost us to get on track it was worth every penny. Some people didn’t really “get it” and spent the day doing slow, boring-as-fuck entries, but about 5 – 10 of the 25 cars there were trying some pretty savage stuff.

It’s rare that people in the UK get chance to practice their spastic entries so the Driftworks and MoT guys did us all proud by hosting the first of hopefully many more of these types of days. I started off the day wiping excess dust off my windows after 6 months of being stood in my unit/barn, and filling the deathproof up with gogo juice. Then me and Dirrt drove the 25 miles from the unit to the track. Thankfully, and quite amazingly, the car made it all the way there without a hiccup, other than me checking nothing was leaking or on fire half way there. We arrived at the track late, as we had to wait for the post office to open to get the coupe taxed, but never the less we were on track by around 10:30am after emptying the tools and usual signing-on etc.

The queue time was around 5 minutes for the average of about 10 cars waiting, which was pretty good compared to the likes of Santa Pod or the BDC days, and with the queue being two cars wide you got chance to have a nosey at the neighbours whip or talk shit to other people and find out what they’re trying on their next run. Off the line I was just ripping the crap out of the chirpy little M50 engine into the top end of 3^rd gear, on the inside of the track, then flicking out to the rumble strips and clutch kicking back towards the infield – my thought process was “JUST SPIN IT” and the corner itself was irrelevant.

Over the day I tried various little tweaks with timings and clutch kicks and handbrakes and footbrakes, but I finally started to get some good entries in when I was used to the distances and speeds of the track. A gnat’s bullock too early and you’d ride up the inner rumble strip or kill a photographer, a bit too late and you went really deep into the corner and close to the gravel trap. I got a backwards entry (circa 100deg, nothing crazy) a handful of times, but most of the time I either went 90deg and got round the corner nicely, or went backwards and then didn’t make the corner with much style.

At the end of the day, the car’s gearbox had become more and more noisy and I was pretty much sweating to death but I’d certainly given the car a hard introduction to the life it’s going to live for the foreseeable future!  She did me proud, living upto her name of “Deathproof”, I only stopped to change wheels and remove the bodged air filter (pair of tights) as I realised it wasn’t doing me any favours and I wasn’t likely to bin it into the gravel.

The best driver of the day was definitely Phil Morrison in the Driftworks s15, with Mitto (Matt Steele) and a couple of other Nissan drivers pulling off some real nice entries, but I was certainly up there with them which was a nice feeling after what seems like an eternity since my last time on a real race track.

Some of the Never-Lift homies were also in attendance on the day, with Jeff “Pikey” Pike pulling off some rediculous angles in his E36 328i, but struggling to make it actually into the corner.

Matt Wilson also drove the arse off his E34 520i but struggled with a terrible power-to-weight ratio.

I’ll be practicing my entries with a much broader mind of what’s possible from now on, and I look forward to the next one of these events!