Unpredictable.
Life’s predictable. Night follows day, tides rise and fall, Julian wins Sideways Group 5.
Yep, life’s entirely predictable, except when it isn’t. It wasn’t last week and it wasn’t this. If Lee’s win over Julian in Group 5 last week was a surprise, his repeat of the feat this week was even more unexpected. Julian, the king of Group 5, beaten two weeks in succession? Wow. Nobody would have predicted that.
The evening had started as normal with the usual group of misfits and slot car enthusiasts rocking up at Molesey, presenting a mixture of lovingly prepared and debatably legal cars to the scrutineer (the sad ones are those which are both lovingly prepared and still debatably legal. How hard is it to read a rule sheet?) and then completely ignoring the start marshal’s forlorn demands for them to line up for the start of the first heat. So far, so predictable.
Eventually the little man in the computer did his countdown thing, the race began and Julian immediately opened a three-second gap to the rest of the field. Again, pretty predictable. Then things changed.
In heat 2 Lee beat Julian by a miniscule 0.004 seconds. The race was starting to look interesting. In heat 3 the impossible began to look vaguely possible when Julian could only extend his lead over Lee by three tenths, taking it to 3.74 seconds. Surely Lee couldn’t beat Group 5’s king two weeks in a row, could he? Perhaps things weren’t so predictable after all. The mid-race tea break soon sorted that anomaly out.
What is it with guys of a certain age? We had the club’s youngster, the Tomster, bouncing off the walls, seemingly high on Turkish sticks (a harmless but weird snack not to be confused with turkey sticks or a West Asian sexual preference) as he celebrated the imminent end of his school year. Huddled in Josh’s Corner were the thirty-somethings, sniggering over a phone watching an activity that most definitely is a West Asian sexual preference, while at the kitchen end the old gits drank tea and reminisced about the time they were young enough to partake in a West Asian sexual preference. Who said predictable male stereotypes are dead?
Anyway, the tea break ended and racing restarted in earnest. Lee beat Julian by half a second in heat 4 to close the gap to 3.24 seconds. This was turning into a humdinger of a race. Heat 5 was Julian’s by four tenths from Lee, leaving his lead small, just 3.64 seconds, but for the king of Group 5 nobody would dare predict that he’d lose more than that in the final heat, would they? Heat 6, the final, was when the unpredictable came out to play.
Throughout the race most drivers had been complaining about a lack of grip in orange lane, saying that the corners were unpredictable to drive. Lee’s first heat had been in orange lane and he’d lost 3.4 seconds to Julian. Julian’s final heat was in orange lane and his lead going into it was 3.6 seconds. Could it really happen? Could Julian really be beaten twice in as many weeks?
Unbelievably the answer was yes. Just as everyone else had, Julian struggled with orange lane’s lack of grip, losing 4.2 seconds to Lee and, with it, the win, the final margin between the two a tiny 0.56 seconds. Few would have predicted it, but Julian was beaten again, Lee once more the delighted victor. Who said life’s predictable?
