| And so to Cadwell Park, where confirmed entries in the race programme were 14, boosted by the late entry of Tony Sinclair in Andrew Peach’s ex-Damian Magee Brabham BT41. 15 is still some way off our target of 20, but we’re certainly better than the 12 we had last year, for the very wet meeting! 15 was split, 4 1600 cc and 11 2000cc F3’s. Unfortunately, the 15 were reduced to 13 on Saturday morning by the withdrawal of Jonathan Price and David Shaw, who were both detained by unavoidable family problems.
13 took to qualifying, Neil Bowman suffered an incurable misfire, so was unable to make race 1, so just 12 started and that reduced to the sorry figure of 9 for race 2. Richard Dutton whose March was not ready, but who ventured out in his Chevron B38 did race 1, but with 2 races in his Mustang on Sunday afternoon, felt that the Formula 3 race would be one too many for him physically and so withdrew. More training required! Mike Jones unfortunately backed his lovely BT38 into the tyre wall and sustained irreparable damage. Unfortunately the stewards failed to see Jamie Brashaw's reasons for not stopping for a black and orange flag, so he was excluded from race 1 and decided to go home and give Sunday a miss too! So what looked like a healthy field of 15 was dramatically reduced to just 9 runners on Sunday. Both races were won by the beautiful ex-Martin Brundle RT3 of Graham Fennimore, whose very professional presence in the paddock added a little more to what which we are currently used to in Classic Formula 3.
For those who did attend, we certainly had a thoroughly enjoyable weekend (despite my throttle cable snapping after 3 laps of race 1!) with the added bonus of wonderful food and beer combined with the Historic FF2000 boys and gals. The weather was more than kind to us with sunshine on both days and a nice ambiance amongst those who did attend. It was a great pity that the HSCC parking plan came to nothing, so as usual Classic Formula 3 cars were scattered all over the place. The moral of the story is, you probably have to arrive a week earlier at a race track in order to park where you are meant to! Unfortunately, the CF3 were allocated the only piece of tarmac parking in the paddock and everybody made a beeline for that as soon as they arrived. Nevertheless, we will try and do better at Silverstone in a month’s time. Well done to all involved.
Hugh Price |
