Friday brought the challenge of the weather... after a few perfect days of pristine track conditions, the day that all the action starts on track, also started in the sky. The clouds loomed over the circuit and began pelting it with heavy rain. One thing was for sure, the track was slippery, but these 86's where a bundle of fun to slide around the track. The session started to form a dry line towards the end and we ended up finishing session 1 in 14th spot. Practice 2 followed later that day, although this time was a reverse of the morning session. This session started dry, and began to heavily rain halfway through our session. One thing we did learn in this session was that in dry conditions, the car had diabolical understeer. We finished this session in 19th and it meant we had a lot of work to do to tune the car up for Qualifying on Saturday morning.

Tom and Ollie from Suspension Concepts worked really hard overnight with Team Engineer John Vernon to turn this 19th place car into a front running machine. Qualifying turned up and the track was warm and sunny, perfect for some fast lap times! I was pushing hard from the outset, the car felt so much better. I was on for a really quick lap time when the session got red flagged with two corners remaining on my lap. This meant that lap was not allowed and we were still sitting back in 16th place. Once the session resumed, I was buried in the pack and had to work to find some track space. I was stuck down in 21st place when I started my last flying lap. I pushed the car extremely hard and ended up crossing the line at the very end to bump myself up to 7th. This was a promising sign that we had moved our set up in the right direction.

Race 1 came later that day and we were bumped up to 6th on the grid after another driver received a technical infringement. I got off to a really good launch and placed my car into 4th by the time we reached turn 2. The first lap consisted of many close battles, which lead to me moving up into 3rd place. The safety car came out and when we went to the restart, it was a huge battle to see who would claim top honours in the first race of 2017. The two in front of me made slight contact which promoted me up into 2nd, before an almighty battle all the way till the finish line saw me cross the line in 2nd place. The interesting twist came when the driver who crossed the line 1st was handed a 30 second penalty for making contact with another car. This gifted us our first National race win! The whole team was ecstatic, I hopped out of the car and ran up to Dad and jumped into his arms. We both had tears in our eyes because we were so happy to have finally won a National race.