I had taken my pal, Julian Brown with me - he is due to enter the championship sometime this year in his X1/9, but has learnt as I did that car preparation takes a long longer than expected. This proved to be very fortuitous - all signed on and down to scrutineering, feeling confident as Scheldt & Pettet have done a great job. And it failed! I knew I was in trouble when the scrutineer ask me to show the brake lights working - all I could think was "what brake lights?"

My fault of course - I had this theory that I didn't need them - have to re-read the Blue Book again. Anyway, here we were, 160 miles from home, no brake lights and possibly no race. Not good! And it got worse - we looked around the car, I knew the wiring wasn't in place but neither were there any brake light bulbs. And better still, there was no brake light switch. And no local Fiat garage about on a Sunday morning.

Enter Julian the hero - we found a brake light bulb in the back of my Thema SW (tow car) - it came in from Switzerland and they are the types to carry spare bulb sets. Thought of taking another from the Thema but all the bulbs were single filament. Stole one from the trailer. This still left a slight problem that we had no wire, no connectors and no brake light switch. A run round the paddock produced a fellow racer who very graciously gave over a roll of cable (must add cable to the spares set for next race) and my tool box produced a connecting block which was chopped up for its connectors. Finally a brake light switch - we took the switch out of the Thema and it fitted fine.

Just as practice started (luckily it had been delayed by 30 minutes due to an accident in an earlier session) the brake lights were working and a trip to scrutineering got that vital pass ticket. Zoomed round to the paddock and got out onto the track a couple of minutes after everyone else had gone out.

See how practice went. Yes, I was badly last - very uncompetitive. But I have excuses! My car is way off the pace power wise, I had not driven it at all before race morning so have no understanding of what it may or may not be capable of, and I had no idea where the track went. Bizarrely my first lap was my fastest in practice - I had a clear run round that time but afterwards spent most of my time staying out of people's way as I had no idea of my way round. It didn't matter - there is no 107% qualifying rule so I qualified by dint of having completed more than 3 laps. But I would be starting at the back in the race, with Group A winner to be (and winner of every race he has finished this season) Enzo in the awesome Alfa 75.

Many hours later I find myself sat on the startline next to Enzo, blipping his throttle big-time. Thought about trying to intimidate him by blipping mine! I found out later that the commentator made a fool of himself by suggesting that I would be giving Enzo a good race - if he had done his homework he would have seen Enzo was 30 seconds a lap (!!) faster than me.

Anyway, the race went well for me - I finished! Needless to say I did finish last, and I did get lapped by many of the other drivers (just the once though) but the car performed faultlessly straight out of the box. It handled neutrally with guesses of tyre pressures, suspension settings etc - and down the straights it could hold its own with the production class Alfa 33s - I am giving away a lot of power and ccs to everyone, something that will be attended to in stages. By the end of the race I had a pretty good idea of my way round the circuit and was getting one or two of the corners reasonably right too - usually due to watching the guys who went past me! As you can see from the results page, I finished 5th in class (there were 7 starters but two didn't make the finish) so now I have 12 points - my life as a racing driver has started well.

Next race, Mallory Park on August 28^th - my entry is in and has been accepted. Hopefully a small amount of development will occur between now and then - I am hoping for a more interesting camshaft to turn up which might increase the power (and rev range) a little and it may be worth investing in some shorter springs - reckon I could get 2" nearer the ground.

Visit the Le Mans Motorsport site for details of the Le Mans Auto-Italia championship and standings so far.

Check out the race report for this race.