Team Green Racing used the first practice session to further experiment with a narrow rear track setting. We made a mistake with the tyre pressures, however, setting them too high and as a consequence Robert reported that they started to overheat after lap four.

For the second practice session we removed the front torsion bar in an attempt to enhance the balance of the kart. On our old set of tyres, Robert was able to turn in a best time of 41.25 seconds, only 2/100ths of a second slower than his best time to date which had been set yesterday on new tyres.

After discussions with Phil Goss, we made some major front-end changes as an experiment for the third practice session. The idea was to slow down the reaction of front end of kart to steering inputs and hopefully enhance the balance as a result.

The setup seemed to have merit, but Robert reported that he felt uncomfortable with the front end on turn-in and consequently was unable to find a rhythm.

This was reflected in the times for the session, which were rather inconsistent. We decided that it would be worthwhile conducting further private testing with this setup, but given the limited track time available at this meeting we would revert to our normal front end setting for the rest of the weekend.

For session four we reverted to our final settings from Thursday and changed to our new tyres as planned. We had found from yesterday's practice that the balance between the old and new tyres was comparable and as a result we had decided to save the new tyres for the final two sessions to simply fine-tune our setup.

Unfortunately this plan was dealt a major blow when Robert discovered on the first lap out in this session that the rear axle was bent. How this had happened is a mystery, but we can only assume that Robert had hit a curb on his in-lap for session three because he had not reported anything amiss at the end of that session.

We had hoped to run the two practice sessions back-to-back with different rear track settings, but now this wasn't possible.

With many thanks to Rocky Stone, and his big hammer, the miscreant axle was straightened in time for the final practice session of the day. We tried the narrower track setting, but the kart felt slow out of the corners and, out of time, we decided to revert to a slightly wider track for the heats tomorrow.

So, all in all today ended up being pretty fraught, but we at least were able to try some major setting variations without risking our race results. Tomorrow the team will experience its first timed qualifying sessions and in the afternoon the two heats will be run to determine starting positions for the pre-final.