Darren Bloomfield wins at BRCA 1/8th Buggy Nats Rd3
Round 3 of the BRCA 1/8th Nitro Buggy Nationals was recently held at the revamped Slough track near Windsor Castle. For the first time in many years, the competitors arrived at Slough to a completely new layout, rather than a tinkered one that could trace its roots back 10 years or more. The new layout offers a huge driving challenge, despite on the face of it looking quite simple. The track is very fast, but has numerous high speed sections that require extreme precision, and with some bumps thrown in the mix it meant mistakes were very easy to come by. Qualifying saw Darren Bloomfield, Elliott Boots and Neil Cragg challenging for the overall TQ, with Elliott taking it from Neil and Darren. The times over the last few rounds were very close as the drivers honed their set ups and worked on the tyre selections. Unusually for Slough the surface was very abrasive and causing high tyre wear for everybody.
The main final got underway and Darren Bloomfield made a great start from the 3 spot on the grid to get to the front early and pull out a good gap back to 2nd place up to the initial round of pit stops. A few small errors from Darren over the next 10 minutes saw that lead eroded and Elliott was back with him, the pace of the two drivers was exactly the same in clear air, with the gap only changing slightly either way outside of errors. Another clipped pipe from Darren saw Elliott sneak into the lead and hold around a 5 second lead, which was gain maintained as the pace was equal. Just before the final round of pit stops, Elliott made an error over the back and Darren was back in the lead with the two drivers together and battling. At this stage Darren was driving tight and slow to keep the line and make Elliott try to go around him, when Darren clipped a pipe and checked up, Elliott was so close and couldn’t avoid going into him. This incident happened just as they were in a group of back markers who all got tangled up and unfortunately for Elliott his engine stopped. This left Darren Bloomfield (Agama) with a commanding lead, so he backed right off to preserve his tyres and cruised round a few seconds a lap off the pace to take a hard earned victory with Neil Cragg (Team Associated) 2nd and Elliott Boots (Kyosho) 3rd. This result leaves the Championship wide open between those 3 drivers and the series moves on to the Herts track after the European Championships where the competition will be every bit as hot.
Source: Nemo Racing [nemoracing.com]
