WISCOMBE PARK

Start
You cannot see the start line when sitting in a car at the paddock exit. If your car is critical on getting to running temperature and staying at it, take particular note of how many cars were in front of you. You may otherwise arrive at the line not having reached running temp or have let things get too hot. If wet, there is no way tyres on non-driven wheels will be clean of paddock mud. Concentrate on cleaning the tyres in the “tyre-warming” area rather than getting them hot. Position your car on the start line at an angle and to one side to get the straightest possible line to the turn-in point for the first corner, Wis. It is impossible to get a perfectly straight line from the start to the first turn-in point, as the bridge you cross is so narrow. Get the straightest line you can.  Concentrate on getting a smooth start. Wheel spin or “bogging down” hurts here, since you have no distance to recover anything before the first corner.

Wis Corner
For most cars, it may help to make Wis into 2 corners i.e. turn in, straight for a couple of yards, turn-in again. Particularly for RWD cars, this reduces the likelihood of cold front tyres not gripping and doing a “wall of death” along the bank on the outside.

Bunny’s Leap
(Its nothing to do with rabbits; it’s the lady of the house’s first name). This used to be flat in anything except the top single seaters in the British Championship. Now the quickest saloons have a “confidence lift” but most do not need to. It may feel like driving off the edge of a cliff the first time but it is straight the other side…(We believe the track has very slightly “settled” before Bunny’s when a drain under the track collapsed, making Bunny’s into a steeper “launch pad”). All cars go very light and some will actually fly. If your rev limit is critical to engine survival; be warned.

The Gate
You can go in quite deep before braking-but those on List 1a tyres should not take too much notice of where local ASWMC cars on “sticky” road tyres brake-the tyre difference is greater under braking than doing anything else. Going off here is not too healthy a pastime. To the left is a stream and a stone wall hidden by a tyre barrier. Fortunately the ridiculous wooden barrier close to the track (that was not a requirement of the track licence) is now history (thanks in part to a 7oaks member’s lobbying). Locking up and sliding through the gate to go off beyond it is also not recommended. Tree branches have penetrated windscreens here. The gate is much faster than it looks and carrying speed through it is crucial to carrying speed all the way through the Esses and to a good overall time. The change from sunlight to shade on a sunny day needs to be anticipated-and the change back further up the Esses at certain times of the day.

The Esses
Wiscombe is now the only hill in the British Championship where a smaller engined racing car can get in amongst the bigger cars. That is because of the Esses. Ideally your car should be geared (and have a cam profile) to allow a gradual increase in speed from the Gate to the braking point for Sawbench. Try and get through the gate in as high a gear as you can pull without having the engine fall completely off the cam. Changing gear at the wrong place can seriously upset balance here. Do not worry if the first part of the Esses passes in a blur. Many cannot describe exactly which way the bends go in the bottom part! In the dry, a saloon with good suspension can hook a wheel over the kerb on the left on to the grass at the crest but it will be slower for most to do so. This is no “Valence in high summer”. The crest makes the car go light and a close encounter with the bank on the right afterwards is likely, as is a lurid “tank-slapper” as the power bites again. Braking for Sawbench can be left very late. If it has rained within the last 24 hours, the Esses is unlikely to completely dry out all day.

Sawbench
There is now a new bit of tarmac on the far left in the braking area for Sawbench. In the past a lot of people have let the left front get on to the dirt under hard braking and been pulled into the sleepers on the left. Some say you need to go wide or tight round Sawbench but not take a middle route. Remember, however, that most RWD cars will hang out the tail on the exit and most FWD cars will “push”. You do not want to run out of room, since the outside bank is vertical and hard. You equally do not want a fishtailing exit that puts you into the outside edge at the next marshals post (which has an unforgiving wooden sleeper at track level, and has left its mark on the chassis of a 7oaks Elan+2…) – but you must get the power down early and hard on the exit to make best use of Castle Straight. (Castle has developed a slight slope to the right over the years and for some reason this seems to manifest itself by making cars twitch to the right on the change to 3rd).

Martini
This is the place to play “last of the late brakers”. If your brakes are effective and your car not too fast, you can leave braking until the “compression” immediately before Martini. The car will then stick further as the track rises towards the corner. There is also an escape road, so you really can experiment in safety. This does not necessarily apply if you have 600bhp. British Hillclimb Champion David Grace had a couple of bad shunts at this point and stopped competing at Wiscombe, even when British championships were at stake. There is massive camber change at Martini. Your nearside rear wheel will be off the ground and the national sport for fellow competitors leaning on the fence rail of the top paddock above you is assessing who has an effective diff. Unless you are running first in your batch, any mistake you make here will be observed by your peers and become the subject of paddock debate. Exactly right gearing is the only way to a perfect run through Martini – and you will almost certainly not have correct gearing. The best overall set up for the rest of Wiscombe and most other hills may well leave you with a first gear that is too low and generates wheel spin here and a second gear that is too high to pull at all. Get the car round the corner and the nearside rear wheel back on the ground before planting the throttle-progressively. It feels painfully slow but you will be across the finish line while others are still spinning wheels.

For further information on Wiscombe Park, including location map and fixture list, visit www.woolbridge.co.uk and select “Wiscombe Park” and “Speed Events” from Menu.

Keith Lay