R1: Historic Masters @ Brands Hatch

Brands Hatch Masters Historic Festival

Pre-66 Touring cars are the ultimate crowd-pleaser! With grids containing road-going mass production saloons built prior to 1966, Masters Pre-66 Touring has everything from the mighty V8 Yank tanks to humble Minis, all raced spectacularly in mini-endurance races with pit stops for one or two drivers.

I am paired with Nick Sampson for The Historic Masters Pre-66 Touring car championship. We both have to qualify and for this race I went first in qualifying. I managed to qualify fastest in my class before handing over to Nick and then as the fuel was used up and the weigh reduced our main competition went very slightly quicker putting us 2nd in class and 10th overall, which we were happy with for our first race in the category. 

The race is started behind a pace car as a rolling start and I made a great start when the lights went green to take 2 places into the first corner. By the end of lap 1 I was up to 7th and started to pull away from the 2nd place Lotus Cortina in my class. By the time I pitted on lap 17 I had opened up a 12 second gap to the 2nd place car in the class. I handed over to Nick who managed to keep the 2nd place car at bay and was still leading the class by 11 seconds when a safety car caused all the cars to closeup and on the race restart we lost the class lead but continued to fight for the position finishing just 0.2 seconds behind in 7th place overall with fastest lap in class.

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