03 Oct 07
The Tour Britannia. The whole idea evokes warm thoughts. Back in the early 1970s there was an event called, originally, the Avon Motor Tour of Britain. It involved crews of racing or rally drivers competing in races and on rally stages dotted along a several-day tour. I pursued it in my souped-up Hillman Imp, met some of the drivers, burnt some of them off at traffic lights because they had to behave properly on the road sections. Richard Lloyd in a Chevrolet Camaro won one year, Gerry Marshall in a Ford Escort RS2000 won another year, while Andy Dawson was so far ahead of the other small cars in his Sunbeam Imp that he was mixing it with the class above.
The Motul Tour Britannia has a similar mix of tracks, hillclimbs and rally-type stages, and is intended for pre-1976 cars with an obvious motorsport connection. Andrew Frankel was entered in his co-driving brother Jonathan's orange Porsche 911 RS Carrera, and daughter Alona and I entered my Lancia Fulvia 1600HF. A further Frankel, racing brother Richard, was in his Alfa Romeo GTAm, all fat arches and ludicrous pace. Naturally he was in the race category, while the 4Car cars were doing the cheaper regularity class, which is also more fun for the co-driver.
Nerves overtook fun at the Brands Hatch start, though. A couple of familiarity laps of the short circuit, then the key timed laps, and a final-lap fling before leaving the circuit, preferably via the pitlane. The flying Frankels had a clever Branz timing and average-speed device, but we had just a couple of stopwatches and a speedometer and odometer that were not only kilometric but inaccurate.
And the roadbook, with its myriad tulip navigation diagrams, used mileage measurements. We'd started to do the conversions to km, but stopped after a few hundred as it seemed futile. We decided to wing it instead, and hope for the best. It was meant to be fun, after all, and to get too competitive might be to lose sight of that.
