“After the Donington race we ran the car on an airfield, which brought to a light a few more niggling problems - so in the end I didn’t get to drive it until Friday testing at Snetterton. Having raced in Formula Ford, Formula 3 and Renault Clios before this year, obviously the Ultima has a lot more grunt than any car I’ve driven before. But like any car, once you’ve driven two or three laps with it you begin to settle in. For a car with such a powerful engine it’s very driveable but I’ve tried to progress in stages, to chip away at my lap times rather than go too quick too soon and throw the thing off the road.

“Things were going well on Friday when the gearbox failed due to the selector pin that sits in the sequential shift barrel mechanism dropping out and locking the gears solid at 140mph. When the box was dismantled later it was a bit of a mess. The shafts had moved apart which stretched the casing and broke three gears.

There was a similar failure at Oulton Park last year and for this year we’ve been using hardened selector pins, but one of them broke. The gearbox was taken to Ratech on Friday where Ray Eades got us all the parts we needed to rebuild it.

“On Saturday the car ran for the whole qualifying session without a problem. It was very cold for qualifying and there was a little drizzle in the air, which probably helped the engine. Really we were still just shaking down the car, but each time we went out we were knocking half seconds off our lap times and in the end Steven set the sixth fastest time which was a pleasing result.

“In the Sunday warm up I was able to go even quicker than our qualifying time on full tanks, which made us really look forward to the race.

“Steven started from sixth on the grid and was up to third by the end of the first lap, but on the second lap the gearbox problems started again. At the end of the Revett straight, where you would normally drop three gears, Steven came out of the corner in fifth, which meant that he lost all the time he’d gained over the cars behind and fell back from the Eclipse TVR. The Ultima kept going and even though the second Mosler came through the field from the back of the grid, we managed to hold onto third when the TVR had an ‘off’ at Russell and then picked up a stop and go penalty for speeding in the pit lane.

“When the pitstop window opened Steven was still running third and actually moved up a place when one of the Moslers made its stop. I got ready to take over the car and Steven was on the radio telling me what was going on with the car when it broke down out on the circuit two laps before our planned pit stop.

“The car was accelerating away from Sear corner onto the Revett Straight and Steven was changing up to third gear when it went crunch. There was no drive, then a few more crunches and the car started freewheeling and stopped at the end of the straight. It looks like third gear stripped completely. That was real shame because I think we were on a for a podium finish.

“Even though I still haven’t had a racing lap in the car yet I’m very optimistic about it. It’s definitely quick enough in a straight line -- we were quicker than the Moslers. The cornering speed is still a bit below the true potential, but we definitely gain on braking and pick up out of slow corners. High speed cornering is a lot to do with confidence in the car and the more miles we cover the better that will get.

“The Snetterton race was the first time that the car has run over any real distance and I’m pretty impressed with it. To be able to run in a solid third place put a smile on everyone’s face after the difficult time we had at Donington.

“Because of the problems we’ve had we’ve had to do most of our testing in public but now I feel that it’s really beginning to come together. I think that there’s still a lot of time to come from the car. We haven’t yet got down to doing things like setting cambers and other tuning for speed. There’s a lot more to come from perfecting the set up of the car and we also have a new engine to come, hopefully at Knockhill, which has been specifically built to work with the restrictors we have to run this year. It’s got more torque and a little less outright power, but its should be a better engine for a GTO car. Now I’m really looking forward to getting enough miles in the car to be able to start playing with set up and then we’ll start to find out what we really have here.”