Comment: Stephen Jelley

STEPHEN JELLEY

BMW BTTC driver, Stephen, tackles a triathlon and races in sweltering temperatures at Snetterton...

did the London triathlon at the beginning of August, based at

Ithe Excel, which was great. I came tenth out of 10,000 entrants, which wasn’t a bad result, and I’ve now qualified for the European Championships for my age group. I think I was second in my age category. That was the weekend before Snetterton.

Snetterton was boiling hot. Dealing with the heat over the weekend was tough, we saw 35-degree temperatures and it was ballistically hot in the car. The car normally operates at 20-degrees over the ambient temperature as a rough estimate. My teammate, Jake Hill, said that the ECU temperature is normally 15-degrees above the cabin temperature, that was about 75-degrees. That’s pretty smokin’ hot! If we’re conservative, it’s probably somewhere around 50-degrees in the car with your overalls, fireproofs and on helmet.

To cope, we cut some more holes in the car. Originally, we were only allowed one air duct, but the organisers let us have one on each side just for extra driver cooling. The driver cooling fan this year had been diverted to the hybrid system, to keep the hybrid cold, so we convinced the team that we needed to add another fan. Those two things made a big difference. I also ran a water bottle system with ice in it, which was great. Ice cold water is great when you’re that hot, you can feel it go down into your stomach and cool you down from the inside out.

I also did heat acclimatisation training at Loughborough University, which involves going in a heat chamber and riding my bike for an hour in 40-degrees heat, then they get me to ramp up the effort to get my core body temperature up to around 39.5-degrees and then hold it there. It’s just a sort of level where you start to go woozy in the head and that’s what we want to avoid in the race car. We don’t want to get to that stage where heat is having an effect on your cognitive performance, which it has done for me in the past. I had a bad experience in the heat at Oulton Park in the BTCC a few years ago.

I did some work last year when guys going to the Tokyo Olympics were using it at the same time, so it was interesting to see what they do to try and do a marathon in 35-degrees. It’s an interesting thing and you definitely can get your body used to it. Your body then basically ups the plasma level of your blood, so you have more liquid in your blood and your body learns how to retain more water. The downside is you sweat more, so you stink more!

At Snetterton we dealt with the heat really well: we had a paddling pool outside to cool the core down afterwards. It was my strongest performance of the year, pace-wise, over a whole weekend, but unfortunately, in race three, I got taken out. The driver came and apologised, but it doesn’t give me the position back and I would have scored really strongly there. I’ve been chipping away to get further into the top ten and I would have been close to being able to get into maybe seventh place and I’ve just dropped back a little bit, so I’ve got to do to pull my finger out.

Qualifying at Thruxton was a pain. It’s a circuit that doesn’t naturally suit the BMW because the front wheel drive cars can seemingly find a lot of performance, and the hard tyre we run is just a wooden block. Considering where we qualified, it was a really positive end. I don’t know how many points we scored but at Snetterton we had loads of pace and we didn’t get the points we deserved, and here we didn’t have loads of pace and got some points. It’s sort of levelling out, but I was really pleased to get a podium at Thruxton because it’s been a bit of a bogey track for me and it’s not a rear-wheel-drive circuit, so to come out with a podium is a pretty good result.

We’ve got a four week wait until the penultimate weekend of the 2022 season which takes place at Silverstone. Hopefully we’ll have some more podiums to talk about next time, and it should be an awful lot cooler too!