Britcar 24 Hour - Oct 1/2/3

The Britcar 24 hour race has been one of the highlights of my racing year for a while now - it wasn't run in 2009 due to lack of committed teams, but this year saw its' return to the Silverstone GP circuit with 60+ entries. In 2007 & 2008 we competed in class 5, but with the new class structure in place, this year we were in class 4, along with cars like the Seat SuperCopa (300+bhp), BMW 130i, Ginetta G40, Civic Tyoe R, Integra DC5 - we were the lowest powered petrol car on the grid, and in the dry qualifying sessions, we were over 10 seconds off the pace - but with the weather forecast to turn decidedly wet for the race, we were fairly sure we would be more competitive.

This years driver line up was our strongest yet. Darron Anley , the car's owner, has had a successful season in the Radical Club championship, taking his first overall pole at Donington the week before the 24 hour. Joining Darron and I were British GT pairing of Chris Hyman & Dan Brown who normally pedal a Ferrari 430 Scuderia.

As expected, the race started dry with Dan staying out of trouble and handing over to Darron just before the rain started. And from that point on Darron made really good progress and he was up to second in class when we ran out of fuel on the pit straight. This lost us 30 minutes of track time while the car was recovered and put us last in class. From that point on, we all had pretty good sessions and the car ran without issue, but the 12 laps we had lost were just too much. We ended up 4th in class (again!) just 2 laps down on the car in 3rd. The pluses were that during the wettest sessions, we were as much as 10 seconds a lap quicker than the fast class 4 cars and we even managed to dice with some of the Astons and Porsches.


The Britcar 24 hour has now been elevated to be part of the MSA British Endurance Championship, and with the new class structure, we cannot really compete in our underpowered car (unless it rains!), so next year, it's highly likely that we will be in something a bit quicker.

For those of you with time to spare, the race will be covered in a 2 hour programme that will be aired on 10th November ESPN 11.30am and MotorsTV 13th November 7pm.