The first competitive event of the Caterham Academy season arrived, and with it has brought The Fever.
It is best described in a photo that appeared on our Facebook group the next day of a driver in helmet and full race kit sitting at a desk in front of a computer captioned ‘Monday after a race weekend, totally not thinking about racing’.
This suitably encapsulates the feeling after the inaugural point scoring event of the Caterham Academy which every year takes 60 enthusiastic novices and turns them into racing drivers.
Mirror Motoring is taking part this year and is each month writing about the progress so far, with this being the fifth entry.
And it has now got very exciting, and the only thing we were racing this month was the clock, before the first of six races proper start in May.
To ease us in as gently as possibly Caterham laid on a sprint event at Curborough, in Staffordshire.
Budding Mirror Caterham racer checks out the competition at event in Silverstone
This sees one car at a time tackle the course to see who could get the best time. Given it is a tight twisty circuit involving a figure of eight I suppose the one car on track rule makes sense.
The day began with a group walk around the track with the resident instructor pointing out the various breaking, turning and apex points to hit for the best time. It appeared quite simple at the time but next time round going at over 80mph, it was a whole different story.
On the first of my two practice laps I went way off the course on the third corner. I am still not sure what knocked the rear wheel arch off – the landing or the cones – but there was definitely room for improvement.
But with an hour between runs there was plenty of time to watch the competition as I was by far not the only one to take an unscheduled detour off-road or spin it.
Such is the concentration required to get the car round as quick a possible several drivers went the wrong way round, pulled up short or even did an extra loop.
By the start of our three competitive laps, the fastest of which would count for final positions, everyone had got their eye in and were knocking seconds of their times. With the bulk of drivers being within 4 seconds of each other with the average around 70 seconds.
It was becoming a battle of skill and nerves.
If you have ever tried to stop/start a stop watch as quick as possible you are doing very well if you can get it in the single digit hundreds of a seconds.
Those are the margins that began to come into play as we all tried our best with identical spec Caterhams.
The only difference was driver skill, and maybe a fraction - how much fuel you had in your car and what tyre pressures you were running.
In one particularly memorable moment and obviously trying as hard as possible, the racer in front of me did his best impression of trying to prove the theory two wheels are quicker than four on the first corner.
My final time of the day was 69.05s, shy of the winner who put in a 65.00s. But it was enough to put me in 7 position out of the 25 competitors in my Green group.
However 6 place was taken by a driver with just a hundredth of a second quicker and left me ruing the time wasting wheel spin at the start or the oversteering on the fifth corner.
Myself and a lot of the field felt a long way away from being able to claim a podium finish this year looking at the competition with more experience.
But as a seasoned observer pointed out those currently at the front will only improve their lap times by fractions but we would come on leaps and bounds with experience. With that nugget of knowledge to buoy us up the season could be closer than we think.
Next up is the first full-blooded race of the year when we will all be on track at once at Cadwell Park, Lincs. Particularly as it is known as the mini Nurburgring, given its reputation for being a bit tricky and hard to over take.
Looks like The Fever is set to get worse.
Find out more about the Caterham Academy
