听鈥淥n Sunday we had the 90-minute endurance听race. This was fraught with incidents. One particular team, mentioning no names, appeared to have decided they could win by knocking everyone else off.

鈥淥ur customer鈥檚 car was hit on lap 1. Then, halfway through the first stint, #83 was hit so hard the airbox came off. With #82 finding its way into the gravel at the bottom of Paddock Hill in its second stint, unfortunately we weren鈥檛 going to be getting any trophies that day.

鈥淒espite all this, and with both our cars having very long pit stops while they were repaired, both cars looked competitive and we still finished lower mid-field; not at the back as you would expect.

“Not the best start to the season, but definitely not the worst either. We all had a lot of fun and most importantly the brakes were great.鈥�

鈥淲e finished the season last month at Snetterton. A huge three-day race meeting for the 750 Motor Club (our organising body), which saw a vast amount of cars on track in many different formulas. We were graced with great weather considering it was October and it was good to see more representatives of our sponsors who came down to watch.

鈥淲e thankfully had a full day setup session before this race and we really honed the car鈥檚 handling. Qualifying was hectic, as ever, and none of us felt we got a good lap in but we could feel the car鈥檚 potential beneath us.听

鈥淗aving qualified in 27^th,听we made a fantastic start, moving up seven places on the first lap alone 鈥� we were really moving and on course for the best result of the season! Until, unfortunately, on lap three, we were side swiped; not a very heavy impact but it caused our rear right tyre to blow out, typically on the first corner after the pit lane.听

鈥淭he car was limped the whole lap, back to the pits with a flat tyre. By the time we got back out on track, we weren鈥檛 just last, but two laps down. Never to give up we pushed on, and with the damage, the car didn鈥檛 feel as quick as it had done earlier but we fought hard.听Having been two laps down before the first round of pit stops, we finished the race in 27^th听out of 35 running cars.听

鈥淣o, we never troubled the podium, however, I am incredibly proud of our little team in their first year.听We definitely made mistakes along the way and hopefully have learned from them. For example, evening test sessions are not long enough, and we will only do full-day testing from now on. You can by and large correlate our race results to the amount of time we had testing at a circuit.听听

鈥淭o sum up, we started the season with only one ambition; to finish every race we started 鈥� we did that and more.

鈥淭eam Hamster Racing was the dream of one mechanic who when the race programme he ran at work was closed down, decided to do it for himself. It started as a bit of fun for a group of friends but has become far more than that.听

鈥淪tay tuned for 2023, where we might even try 91传媒鈥檚 RP pad range鈥︹��