Sticky Finger.
NSR Formula 86/89 returned to Molesey this week, and with a healthy grid of eleven drivers it promised to be a festival of brilliant driving, brilliant racing and brilliant engineering, all played out to the purring soundtrack of eleven meticulously prepared cars. What it actually turned into was nothing of the sort.
For the first time in ages, everyone was ready to race well before the scheduled 8:30pm start time, the only unexpected absentee being the Tomster, so Neil programmed the race computer, the first heat assembled on the grid, and at 8:28pm, just as the ‘Go’ button was about to be pressed, bang, the club door swung open and in walked Tom. The poor boy had, apparently, woken up late after having an afternoon nap. A nap?! For a fifteen-year-old? WTF?! They don’t make them like they used to, that’s for sure. Neil sighed, muttered an expletive and set about reprogramming the race computer. So much for a prompt start.
When the race did eventually get going, it didn’t come close to being the festival of brilliant driving that had been expected. Instead, everyone crashed, most multiple times, in one of the most crash-strewn races seen at Molesey for a very long time. At times, cars were hitting the barriers so frequently and with such force that the clubroom sounded more like a fairground coconut shy than it did a slot car club. And as for purring cars, forget it. Some of them, as you would expect, sounded lovely, but others didn’t, Ed-the-Gritter’s in particular initially sounding as rough as the muck-spreader fitted to his gritter lorry.
Still, crashes and dodgy cars or not, a race was happening. Lee took an early lead, David was second from Simon, then came Graham and Neil. Behind them it was chaos. Ed lost a stack of time due to his car’s failing gear train, Terry had problems too, and Vince was stone last, repeatedly trying to destroy his car against the fence.
Fortunes changed in Heat 2. Neil and Josh lost loads of time to crashes, others crashed too but lost less time, the result being that Lee still led, but David was now just three seconds behind. Josh, having fallen to ninth place, had started to blame his crashes on “sticky finger” – an unexplained inability to fully release his controller’s trigger – a new excuse not previously heard at Molesey and variously speculated upon by everyone else as being either a result of him not washing his hands properly after a particularly messy trip to the loo, not washing his hands properly after “night time” activities, too much salt intake or a terminal disease. If he turns up next week, we’ll know it’s not the latter.
Heat 3 saw David overtake Lee to take the lead by a mere 0.86 seconds, Heat 4 saw Lee regain top spot by just three tenths, and Heat 5 produced the best racing of the night when Alex, Neil and Ed crossed the line separated by just five hundredths. Meanwhile, after numerous attempts, Vince had finally succeeded in properly destroying his car by hitting the wall at the end of the main straight so hard that the car’s bodywork snapped clean in two.
At the finish it was Lee who took the win, David was second, Simon third and Alex, who’s been quietly improving his driving week by week and is now beginning to look like a future podium contender, fourth.
It was another great night at Molesey, but as a display of error-free driving it was a duff. It’s tempting to say that it can’t get much worse, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
