The president of the Historic Sports and Racing Car Association believes their recent Autumn Historics race meeting was able to go ahead due to the diligent preparation from all stakeholders involved with the event.
Drivers, team members, officials and administrations made the event possible, with the race meeting at the Wakefield Park facility, which saw around six classes compete across two days of non-stop action.
As a range of historic racing cars hit the track in perfect conditions, passionate historic car lovers put on a show, racing their pride and joys.
With each individual implementing specific precautions put in place by the club, the meeting ran without any hiccups and president Richard Cardew praised the attitude of everyone involved.
“We persisted with the event for a few reasons, which included us doing our homework to be well informed of the issues and what the Government strategy was. The subsequent information only helped us confirm the event,” Cardew said.
“Because of the importance of this decision, it needed to be a general committee vote and when we did have the meeting, it was decided unanimously to commit to the event, which received a lot of positive feedback.
“And we were comfortable with our decision in the end because it went very well. People were aware of the proper procedures in place and they happily adopted them, so that was very good.
“We were blessed with beautiful weather, the event was incident free.
“There was a united effort from all parties to make sure this event went ahead smoothly and while it may not have been a financial success, it was a definitely a success in the sense that it gave people much joy in these interesting times.”
While there may have been social distancing off the track, the same rule didn’t apply for the racing itself as the categories put on a fantastic display throughout the weekend with a number of close results.
The closet battle came in the supersprints sessions between Michael Henderson and Kerry Hughes, with both drivers winning two sessions each, although it was Henderson who had the last laugh after claiming the commentators’ prize for the best performing driver in the category.
For the regularity drivers, three wins to Raymond Lewis saw him take out the victory ahead of fellow contenders such as David Ellis, Geoff Morse and commentator’s prize recipient Richard Rose.
Another major category across the weekend was the BMC Challenge which was comfortably won by Damien Meyer in the 1969 MG Midget over Chris Collett and Graham Russell.
Wayne Seabrook was the pick of the Group S cars with three races wins, including the category’s challenge event, which also earned him the commentators’ prize.
In Formula Ford, William Marshall won four of the five races, while three runners-up saw Bruce Connolly nominated for the commentators’ prize.
The only race Marshall didn’t win during the event was a race shared with the Group QR class, which Justin McLintock eventually took top honours for, along with the three other wins in the category’s separate races.
McLintock’s performance was enough to secure the category’s commentator’s prize, like David McKenzie in the LMO class and Paul Tierney in the Group N category, although Tierney was overshadowed by David Stone who won every Group N over the weekend.