TORCH – Titchfield Off Road Car Hants
Last Sunday I popped over the other side of Southampton to TORCH – Titchfield Off Road Club Hants, a neat astro track that’s been there for years, but has been keeping itself quiet. We drove away saying why on earth had we never been there before!
They race on a Sunday morning, and like to crack on with the racing at 9am, to get home for a nice lunch. Not such a bad thing actually, as you can then if you wish stick around for a bit of testing and then head off, making a fuller day of it if you prefer. There are plans for some all day meetings in the near future.
The track is mature, a traditional 90s off-road track, relatively flat, a couple of humps, and lots of little bumps.
They’re working on it this year to make improvements – the only ones it really needs (in my opinion) is to make it a bit wider in places (perhaps by making it shorter) and to include more 3 dimensional features. In the afternoon they made a start on the 3d features by adding an excellent table top.
The lap length is rather long, lots of full speed sections but the track flows well, and reward neat smooth lines. It’s certainly not an easy track, it’s nicely challenging to get good lines.
About 18 racers turned up, split evenly between 2 and 4wd. The nice sunny day brought the track grip up, and it was sensationally grippy. It seems that Schumacher BLUE minispikes are the order of the day here, with possibly 2wd fronts on 4wd. There’s huge amounts of grip available.
There was bizarrely only two heats, and then big gaps in between them. There could have easily been 4 heats with a couple of minutes between each one and the morning would have flowed very nicely.
They run the usual AMB timing, and have a small selection of handout transponders, if you don’t have PTs.
Ability was pretty good, everyone could get around the track, and some were obviously faster than others. I was somewhere in the middle of the field.
I loved it. I’ll definitely be back, it will now be my regular ‘local’ track methinks.
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