Crail Raceway

C

rail is around 250 miles from York; so it meant leaving at 04:10 to meet up with the Klub. That wasn’t too much fun, especially as the hour changed and I “lost” an hour of sleep. So it felt like 03:10!

Still, I was back home at 20:00 hours, and the Ka had put on over five hundred miles on in the day!

I’ve covered an entertaining forty minutes in pursuit of a Rover 200 here, which took place en route to Edinburgh on the A696.

I arrived at the meeting point five whole minutes late, which is rather disappointing. There were two other Kas already there, with a third arriving a few minutes after me, and SkinDemon just a few minutes after that. We were soon on our way to Crail village, just a mile or so from the Raceway.

Crail is a coastal village, and the drag strip basically leads to the sea. After the timed quarter mile, there is another quarter mile or so of deceleration space, which some of the higher performance cars probably need since they were touching 130 mph at the quarter mile point. For the Ka, the deceleration space didn’t need to be anywhere near this length, since Kermit was just shy of 70, and the other Ka just above 70.

We parked up as a Klub, although later in the day our space would be invaded by other, inferior, cars.

Only two Klub members were brave enough to take to the strip - myself and SkinDemon. We weren’t especially interested in competing with other cars, primarily because we know we’ll get beaten, although we did want to race one another. However, this required some planning.

On our first go, SkinnyD was lined up against a BMW M3. Now I know that seems a bit unfair, but we did wander across to the chap in the BMW and said, “no pressure, just don’t stall it, okay?” Suffice to say, neither of us defeated the opposition, but that wasn’t our objective. You can watch the opening few seconds of the video by clicking here (Quicktime Video, 2·6 Mb, no sound).

I was alongside a Nova GSi, and you can watch it disappear into the distance here.

Later on, we managed to arrange it so that we were up against one another.

I was slower off the block, but even so Kermit was quicker to 60 feet, but SkinDemon’s Ka was quicker to the quarter mile. I’ve detailed the statistics, and analysed them, here.

And then onward to home, via the A68 - a six hour trip, including four or five stops for tea, and for the effects of tea! I left Scotland at 16:45, and was home for 20:00 hours.