Drayson Racing's Jonnny Cocker files his latest blog from the Okayama circuit in Japan, shortly after his first career overall pole position in prototype racing!
Hey all!
 | | Jonny (right) celebrates his pole position with teammate/team owner Paul Drayson. |
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So we had a pretty busy day on today! Both of the practice sessions and qualifying all in one day! With only a couple of hours running before qualifying it was very important that we were focused on establishing a solid setup for the car as quickly as possible as the first race is tomorrow with only a short warm-up session before hand!
The first session went great. Myself and Graham Moore, the Drayson Racing team’s race engineer, had discussed prior to the session about setup for the car based on the little amount of information we had on the circuit. We knew that it would be important for us to have good mechanical grip in the middle sector of the lap through the tight and twisty sections but also a good high-speed balance through the faster corners at the end of the lap. So it would be a fine line between the two and finding the best compromise possible!
We ended up P4 in the first session which was a good result, but there was certainly still room for improvement. After a pretty lengthy debrief post-session we had some really good changes that would be made to the car for the second practice session and they paid off! P3 in the second session with a less than perfect run! We knew that we still had plenty of time in the bag so qualifying was going to be pretty exciting!! We ended up making a couple of small changes to the car again for qualifying but basically ran with our setup from practice two.
The decision was made to wait pretty late in the qualifying session until we went out (to avoid traffic as much as possible) and the car was fuelled for a maximum of 4 laps. The pressure was on but I was feeling pretty good coming from the previous two sessions. The car felt fantastic and everything was working great!
 | | Jonny writes, "The team and everyone involved with this project have done an incredible job and this just makes it all worth while..." |
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I ran my first couple of laps, first a 1:19.3 then found a couple of tenths and set a 19.1 which I remember thinking at the time, actually, that’s pretty quick, but had no idea where the other cars were in relation! I was then in traffic and slowed to find myself a space. While I had a minute I called Dale White, our team manager, on the radio and asked how we were getting on. I was pretty surprised when Dale replied: “We’re P1, stay out, stay out.” As calmly as possible I replied: “OK”. Deep down thinking “WOW” but obviously until the session was over we wouldn’t know for sure!
Dale called to me and we pitted the next lap. That meant a three-minute wait until the end of the session before the result was confirmed. It had to be one of the longest three minutes of my life! Finally the session was over and we were POLEEEE!!! A pretty amazing feeling really and it’s still not really quite sunk in!
The team and everyone involved with this project have done an incredible job and this just makes it all worth while, especially coming from Laguna and having a pretty huge job rebuilding the car after the incident in the race! Well done everyone! Amazing!
So now I’m really looking forward to tomorrow morning and starting from the front in the first race! It’s going to be pretty exciting so make sure you’re watching!!!
-JonnyFor more on Jonny, visit jonathancocker.com or draysonracing.com.
