Reintroducing Autocross to Kent
After watching a 60’s video of the Players No.6 autocross championship the other Sunday, it brought home to me about the lack of events in the SE. After some investigation, the Southern Counties Autocross Championship seems to be the core of Autocross today, running events in Weston Super Mare, Sugworthy, Chepstow and so on, which to most of us is simply too much of a distance to travel from Kent and the surrounding areas. It was very well supported in the late 70’s, a lot of road/rally cars and the occasional sprint cars came out with a tyre swap. So I’m writing this piece to see if it generates enough interest amongst you, the members. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far…My plan is to bring back a ‘Players No.6’ championship 2004 style. With entry fees rising in sprints etc the average clubman level racer is finding it harder to get an edge over your Carlos Vandango with a never-ending budget.
Take the Autograss formula as a great example. £8.50 for a whole day’s worth of club racing, 3 heats and 2 finals, low-cost fun and some good competition, pretty good really? Well…this is what we need to conjure up again with Autocross. There must be a good amount of cars sitting in lock ups that could easily be put into a class. A good class would be Mini’s up 1000cc, all interior could be removed with a cage, and limited modifications, e.g. a stage 1 tune. Limited body modifications, choice of tyres free, wheels free. I won’t go into detail now, obviously more will be discussed if anything progresses from here.
I’m confident we could resurrect Autocross in conjunction with 7oaks, TWMC, RMC and other SE area clubs. More mature club members (not me!) must remember the Players No. 6 championship, which was very popular, probably because of Roger Clarke in that Mk1‘tina demonstrating how to put RWD to good use! It isn’t destructive to the cars because only 2 compete at a time. How about all of you with PCT cars? Why not have dual-purpose competition cars, for trials and autocross?
Anyway, moving on, what has Kent got left in the form of location? Pestalozzi and Valence have been taken away, Lydden is still on the yearly threat from McLaren, and so we need something else to relight the fire. So this is a perfect opportunity to pick up from where we left Autocross back in its prime. Escalating entry fees and so on in other forms of circuit racing is scaring people off so this will need to loosely follow the previous mentioned Autograss entry fees. Obviously there is a huge amount to discuss, I’m just trying to get the ball rolling.
If this were to go ahead, with the right promotion I’m positive it would attract loads of attention…to quote from another club...“This year has seen the FODMC revisit its roots by running an autocross. The Severn View Autocross took place at Woolaston and saw a bumper entry enjoy a highly successful event”… that was a one off event so it looks promising that the general turn out would be good with a possible full entry list if we were to launch it again.
Please e-mail me with your views/suggestions at: taity_boy@hotmail.com
Adam Tait, B19 Motorclub