What is Dover? part 1

Jamaican motorsports, this thing has always intrigued me.... There's a story m father told me, The Dover Race Track in Brown's Town, St. Ann was opened in the Easter of 1989, I was born the May of that year and by August I visited my first race.

Since then trips to Dover have been irregular, my interest peaked right after turning 16, I was regularly following up on all of Jamaica's car events and Dover was just one of those things I really couldn't get to even if I wanted to. There were 4 events per year: Easter Monday, Labor Day [May 23], Independence Day/Emancipation Day [August 1 & 6] and Heroes' Day [3rd Monday in October]. School essentially blocks me from going to them all with the exception to the Independence Day meet which either I participate in the Classic Car Club's Independence Day partakings or my father complains of being tired. Since getting my licence I've found myself driving there on my own and this year same thing happened only exception I managed to sneak in some time to get to go to the Heroes' Day meet.

The following blog highlights on my journey to both the 2011 Independence Day meet as well as the 2011 Heroes Day meet.

The Independence Day meet was the first meet I can say I paid for fully, from gas, to tickets, to food [as well as for my cousin]... all out of my pockets [still hurts now]. All the pre race chatter focused around the continuous rivalry between David Summerbell Jr. and Doug Gore. The rivalry between them has been back and forth and up until this year Summerbell dominated the track with his AMS prepared Evolution 8 [aka TA1] Gore's Evolution 6 was modified to the point where it couldn't go any further and reveled a bit in a slightly tuned Evolution 10 but still couldn't match the record breaking performance of the TA1. This year however a new sponsor with the name of ATL Autohaus [A new Audi dealership] took up Gore and handed him a DTM Spec Audi TT tuned and ballasted to compete in the almost unrestricted class of Thundersport

Gore [silver Evolution] and Summerbell [yellow Evolution] in the early days.

Gore and Summerbell part 2, this time Summerbell gets new paint and a new sponsor while Gore takes it easy in a new car.

Gore and Summerbell today, rivalry still hot as ever

The first 2 races of the season the Audi TT lacked the pace of the TA1 as the team blamed a lack of tuning to be the problem. I myself stated that the naturally aspirated 2 wheel drive machine would not catch on to the 4WD turbocharged beast that is TA1.

But I was worng

The practice and qualifying sessions showed that the DTM TT caught up to the pace of TA1 and indeed had the pace to break the record, something I was looking forward to witness on race day.

By the time I reached Dover I had already missed one thundersport race, Gore and Summerbell were neck and neck until they crashed before the end of the lap [a really bad quality video of that race is here] Upon hearing this I was told that I had no need to worry as both cars were repaired in time for the rest of the races. Because of an international quality pit facility, Dover accommodates for 3 series of sprint races each lasting 5-7 laps depending on class. Most classes are bracket racers with B37 [1:37] and B45 [1:45] each split into naturally aspirated and turbocharged classes. These races are essentially road cars prepped by everyday civilians just to have fun. The other classes, MP [modified production] are as the name suggests, cars built for racing only each with their own rules which I won't get into the detail of. The final class is Thundersport which is almost unrestricted, in most events the MP class as well as Thundersport are on the track at the same time where as B37 and B45 are run at separate times. The following pictures show a lot of the cars in and out of the pits during my time there.

Onwards to Thundersport race #2. Both cars were prepared and the race was off. Both cars were literally nose to tail [this was a reverse grid btw] and quickly bopped and weaved their way throughout the pack and continued their two horse race. [another low quality vid of the race is here] Essentially Gore's much lighter DTM car had the corners on lock while the 4WD and turbocharged motivation made Summerbell a real threat on the exit of corners. After a while it just became evident that Gore was driving defensively for the whole race and managed to keep off Summerbell till the end.

Thundersport Race #3, the final race of the day. What started out as a one lap battle for the lead eventually turned into Doug Gore giving the race track a good piece of rape lapping everyone in sight. From memory before the race was over, Gore pulled out a 6 second gap ahead of Summerbell and looked like he was on a Sunday cruise. Unknown to me at the time, Gore broke Summerbell's track record of 1:18.4 [set in 2009] with an impressive 1:18.114 set in the 3rd lap of the race. With that, Dover was done and on to the next meet......

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