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Crail Raceway

http://www.crailraceway.co.uk/
Balcomie Road, Crail, Scotland KY10 3XL

Hotels: Balcomie Links Hotel or Golf Hotel & Restaurant

Crail is a disused airfield (i.e. very flat) in the east of Fife, near St. Andrews & very near the shore. It is used for a number of motorsports events, including track days, 1/4 mile drag racing and club hire.

Crail Airfield, 1stLotus May 2002

Andrew soon put us to work on a dieseled up skid pan area. My poor car was soon covered in diesel - but controlling sideways movements in slow motion like that was too much fun to miss out on - a sort of Elise ballet. The skid area allows you to experiment with both understeer and oversteer. 2 people were allowed on the skid pan area at once - we each stayed at opposite ends of the circuit though. Occasionally we would elect to switch directions to practice controlling the car in the opposite direction. Doing a nice 180 spin on the dieseled corner to achieve the objective of changing direction was optional (and fun :o)

After playing about like that for a while Andrew picked on me to move onto the next activity. As we had covered braking techniques in previous sessions, we went straight onto understeer/oversteer techniques. We had covered this before, but I wanted a reminder. 

Basically this exercise involved driving around and around in circles (trying not to get too giddy) and find the maximum gripping point of the tyres and the optimum steering wheel angle - then using the throttle to steer the car around ever widening arcs. This again was great fun, but was rather spoiled by the amount of gravel on the airfield surface. Being an Elise owner, you soon get used to stone chips, but this was rather daunting! 

After mastering the throttle exercise, it was off to do a track based circuit, including a mixture of a long sweeping bend, a hairpin, and a mini chicane - with a few extra corners thrown in for good measure. The combined noise from the engine, the huge amounts of gravel hammering my car to pieces, and Andrew shouting instructions was certainly exhilarating!

With some concern for the worsening state of my car, I only did a few laps. A problem with the suspension was developing too. The suspension had sunk since it had been fitted, and although it was still at a reasonable height one of the shocks was obviously defective. On sharp high speed bends, the front wheel arch of the clam was impacting on the tyre :o(