Local car enthusiast, Martin Buchan (23) is competing in the Scottish Ford Fiesta XR2Championship having made his debut last year. After a strong performance at the end of the season, expectations are high for this season.
This year saw many new changes to the championship, the biggest being a new title sponsor for the series with Yokohama replacing Kumho Tyres after 13 years of service. This led to the XR2’s using brand new Yokohama control tyres which had been tipped to shave laptimes by as much as 1.5 seconds compared to the old Kumho tyres.
After the season’s first test on the 10th of April, Martin came to the first meeting with high hopes after setting a good pace on the new control tyre, but on his 8th lap of the 1st session, Martin missed a gear change and heavily damaged his XR2 engine which left the team having to stay all night and fix the engine just to be ready on Sunday.
Sunday came and with the engine now repaired and fully functioning, Martin set out into a heavy rainfall for qualifying. The drivers had 10minutes to set their best lap on the worsening track and even with a windscreen that was heavily misted up meaning that at times Martin had no references to the track, he set a best lap of 1.14.651 which was good enough to put him 11th on the grid but with the championship also running Fiesta ST cars which are allowed to use properly prepared racing wet tyres, this gave Martin 5th in the XR2 class and 4th in newcomers class which is for drivers in their 1st or 2nd year of circuit racing.
With the rain now steadily declining, Martin took out to the grid for the first of 2 races on the Sunday, the track was still wet all over and in some places rivers had started to form across the track. Once the entire grid had been assembled and the warm up lap completed, the 5 red lights shone and up went the engine revs. Out the lights went and the race was underway, Martin got a good start but behind him two fellow competitors got fantastic starts and so 2 places had been lost going into the first corner. Further round the lap an incident at Carlube corner gave Martin a place back and some clear space to put in some fast laptimes. Late on in the race Martin had caught up to one of the championship runners and proceeded to challenge him for the remainder of the race, at times even pulling alongside but to no success. At the finish Martin came home in 12th place which meant 6th in the XR2 class and 4th newcomer.
The 2nd race was held on a much drier track but once again martin was beaten off the start by 2 competitors behind him. Coming up to the hairpin on lap 2 Martin looked to pass after the driver in front locked his brakes but coming out of the hairpin the two made contact which put Martin’s steering out of line but thankfully he could still continue. Over the remaining laps Martin was in a deep fight for 6th place and twice was ahead but on both occasions his opponent would repass him. However on the 8th lap a red flag was shown due to a car being parked in a dangerous position and so on account to the rule of declaring the results a lap before the red flag Martin was given 6th place by 0.195 seconds. In the newcomers Martin achieved a second 4th position.
The next race is to be held at Knockhill on May 8th and 9th with all the Scottish Motor Racing Championships supporting the British GT championship. Coverage of the races can be found on Motors TV (Sky 413, Virgin 545 XL Package)
