Real World Racing – EnduroKa at Donington

Report by Andrew Harbey with Chris Haye

9 April 2022

A dry but windy day awaited me at Donington, as I went to support my friend Chris Haye in his first real life race – the opening round of the EnduroKa series, a 5 hour race on the National layout.

I took a couple of lenses with me for the day; the 70-300 for any closer work and the 200-500mm for some longer shots, plus it would give a bit more zoom for the small Ka’s !

I started with the 70-300 as I went to see Chris and the rest of the Grid Finder team; the final couple of stickers were being applied and the car was sitting in the garage after qualifying.

It was still shiny and clean as the light reflected from the garage lights show ! I adjusted my white balance to a manual setting of 4760K to match the light's temperature, then increased the ISO, to make sure plenty of light made it into the picture.

Chris Haye takes up the story:

With years of sim racing under my belt I was unsure what to expect when I took my first steps into the world of club motorsport. On one hand, I was confident that I had a good understanding of the nuances of car control; aspects like weight transfer and the circle of traction are second nature in the sim.

On top of that I had hundreds of thousands of laps of racing experience battling with other drivers. But, there was that inevitable creeping doubt about how I would react to the dreaded ‘fear factor’.

The reality is, that’s one of those squishy, psychological, human nature things that you just can't test in your spare bedroom in iRacing. And of course, there was the question about how well those skills would transfer from the virtual into the meatspace!

But, the deck was tilted somewhat in my favour and racing with GridFinder proved to be an excellent fit for my first hesitant steps into a proper race. Tom Stapley-Bunten and myself are complete novices, but Toby Owen and Darren S Cook are experienced club racers. Their guidance during our two testing days proved invaluable.

My preparation for our first race started in the sim, where I modified an existing car in Assetto Corsa to better match the lightly modified Mk1 Ford Ka we’d be racing. The Abarth 500 fitted the bill thanks to its short wheelbase, narrow track and semi-slick tyres.

Of course, the weight had to be adjusted to match the 950Kg minimum required by the regs, and then there was the matter of the drivetrain. Ford turned out various Ka models, with 4 pots producing in the region of 64-69 mind-bending horsepower.

Combined with alterations to the gearbox and diff to match the factory spec, we had something that was fairly representative of the diminutive little Ka, at least from the driver’s seat!

A few hundred laps of the Donington Park National Circuit later and I was achieving lap times that matched front-runner pace during the 2021 EnduroKa round, which was encouraging ! So, all that was left was to try it for real.

We booked a track day and Graves Motorsport arrived with our freshly built EnduroKa. I took the opportunity to sit in the temporarily installed passenger seat alongside Toby to see what our little orange terror could do, which proved invaluable. I would recommend anyone that has an interest in getting started in motorsport takes the opportunity to see how it’s done first hand before they get behind the wheel.

My first solo laps were fairly tentative. The psychological barriers that I feared would present themselves turned up right on cue. So far, so predictable. But, what I didn’t expect was how quickly they would dissipate, and within a few laps I was really pushing. The car felt great!

The little EnduroKa is really lively and surprisingly engaging to drive. Sure, it’s FWD, so you’re always managing understeer, but the back end is set up nice and stiff, so there’s plenty of movement going on behind you!

By the end of running, I was around a second slower than Toby, which I took as a very positive sign. I hadn’t managed to get a lot of track-time, but the fundamentals were there. But there was the lingering question of how that would hold up in racing conditions ?

My first experience of this was during qualifying. With 48 cars on the short National circuit, and 4 laps to make a mark, this was a struggle. Despite leaving big gaps at the start of each of my laps, I constantly ran into packs of cars on out laps, seemingly on a Sunday drive !

With no real representative lap, my time was only good enough for 32nd place. Frustrating, but to be expected. And as such, we left Toby a full 20 minutes to qualify the car, and he did a stellar job to place us 18th on the grid for the race.

AH. For the race start I went to the inside of Redgate, making use of the picnic benches to give myself a bit more height. I switched to the 200-500 so I could get some closer shots of the cars, as some of them had mock / faux sponsors lending to the (relatively) relaxed attitude of the series, including the SuKaru in WRC Subaru livery – very detached from the rally car !

It was also a great spot to watch the cars racing closely and overtake each other. The Ka is all about momentum, which meant those who had a better entry/exit to Redgate could start to overtake/overlap on the run down the hill.

It was also a place where over-enthusiastic drivers can lose time, running wide can lose a lot of time. The standard solution seemed to be keeping the right foot down to power through !

CH. Not wanting to put a complete novice into the meat-grinder for the banzai first-stint, Toby took the start and battled his way into the top 10, even running as high as second place for a time.

Tom and Darren kept us within the top 20 during their stints and handed the car to me for the final 75 minutes of the race.

AH. I then headed clockwise around the track, moving down to the Craner Curves, staying on the inside of the track to start with.

The big lens was very useful here, with plenty of time at the full 500mm zoom ! 

There was quite a strong breeze so the monopod was essential, but this also meant that the clouds moving over the sun constantly changed the lighting conditions – one of the features of the British weather...

I then made the walk under the track and around to the outside and down the hill, finding one of the gaps in the fencing where you can see the cars as they drop down through Craners and disappear out of sight.

There were times when the cars were passing and all across the track – I managed to get one with them nicely lined up and in a neat formation.

The outside of the Old Hairpin was a good chance to stop for a coffee and also to see the cars starting to head back up towards Schwantz.

This is a great spot to see which drivers have managed to carry the most speed and gain an advantage up to McLeans. It's also a point where there's lots of overtaking to be seen.

CH. “Bring the car home, our only objective is to finish”. Toby’s wise words were very much echoing in my head as I rolled out of the pitlane. The responsibility of taking the last stint wasn’t lost on me. Endurance racing is a team effort of course, but until you’re there in the maelstrom, those words have less of an impact.

If I messed it up, I’d be letting down 3 other drivers and the hard-working mechanics from Graves Motorsport who were looking after the engineering side of things. And that’s where it all started to go wrong.

Unbeknownst to me, we had picked up a couple of track-limit violations during previous stints, and had 5 and 10 second time penalties applied to our race time. The next infringement would be a stop and go penalty… you can see where this is going!

The track limits in this and other club series are much stricter than you may be familiar with from the likes of Formula One. Just one tyre outside of the white line and you’re on the naughty step. On the first flying lap of my stint, I got some nasty snap oversteer entering the Old Hairpin, and did just that, running slightly wide onto the concrete apron that so many other series treat as part of the racetrack!

Passing the start line, our pit board read “in” and my heart sank. Was there a problem? Did we have a mechanical failure? Did I exceed the pit speed limit? These were all questions that would have been answered had we not had a radio failure earlier in the day. I was in the dark.

As I returned to our pit box, the mechanics waved me through. Perhaps this was a drive through, or maybe a mistake ?  Being the last but one pit box, I didn’t have a lot of time to chew over the possibilities. And less than a second later I found myself driving past a marshal holding a static yellow flag by the pit exit. Curious.

If you’re familiar with club motorsport, you may know what this means, and if not, you’ve probably worked it out from context. Prior to the event I had taken my ARDS test, poured over the series regs, the event notes and of course I attended the drivers briefing. So I was comfortable with the idea that a stationary yellow flag indicated that there was an incident on the track in the next sector, and that I should proceed with caution, which I did.

As it turns out, this is where I should have served a stop and go penalty. Though I only worked that out one lap later when I passed my pit board again indicating that I needed to pit-in. This time around the team were pointing directly at the flag Marshall, and all of the pieces fell into place. As an aside, a board reading ‘Stop & Go’ would have really cleared things up here!

Two unplanned trips into the pits cost us a massive amount of time and dropped the car outside of the top-20, which after our earlier form was deeply frustrating. But, as the chequered flag fell, I still had no idea what the penalty was for, how this series of events had unfolded, and on my cooldown lap my mood was, frankly, all over the place!

AH. I stopped by the outside of the chicane to watch the field go through a few times, with many different driving lines on display. I switched back to the 70-300 to give myself more flexibility.

The sun was to the left of me so there was some light on the cars, but the clouds were still moving a bit. There was a variety of lines and making a pass gained cars a place, but took away any momentum for the run down the start-finish straight!

I then moved up to the small grandstand at the pit entrance. It was open to all as the meeting was smaller than most. This helped to demonstrate the difference between the faster and slower drivers, with a few moves being made all the way down the straight.

I switched to the 200-500 to get some closer shots, with some cars showing battle scars but still going round and round. I also took the chance to get a zoomed in shot of Chris in his first real life racing stint – looking ahead and concentrating on the job at hand!

Other drivers were also making visits to the pits, including this well-made Texaco-liveried Ka that locked the rear left as it was braking for the line ! Thankfully the driver managed to control it and avoid an accident – it made for a nice sequence of photos.

CH. The team was incredibly supportive and tried their best to lift my spirits, but it hit me hard. This mattered. This mattered more than any sim race I’d ever been involved in.

This was a team effort; 4 drivers, 4 mechanics, not to mention friends and family that helped out along the way and of course the guys that built the car. And, finishing 27th after showing so much promise earlier on felt like a defeat, even though our only objective was to finish. And, no amount of sim racing could ever prepare me for that feeling.

AH. To finish the event, I went and grabbed a couple of pictures with the 70-300 as Chris returned the car to parc ferme and then to the garage – the car was back in one piece and they finished the race!

I'd thoroughly recommend going to watch the EnduroKa series – there's also a full livestream on YouTube with commentary, which was a great way to keep up with the action when away from the speakers.

The next round is a 6 hour race at Cadwell Park on 7^th May.