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In the heat of early July, with most of the nation watching England beat Sweden in the World Cup. I ventured to Brentwood RC for a good night’s racing and crashing.
The stars of the show today would be The Ford Cortina, Capri and Sierra which would be run as bangers with 1300 stock cars in support.
The Ford Cortina was a large family saloon car produced for 20 years (1962-1982) which evolved through 5 different marks. It was Britain’s best selling car of the 1970s and there was a Cortina for everyone; they came as spacious estates and saloons for the family or businessman. In the early days there was even a coupe! For those on a budget there were a number of small, economical engines or larger engines such as the Essex V6 for those looking for a little more power. They even had considerable success in both touring cars and rallying in the 1960s and 70s!
The Capri shared a lot of mechanical underpinnings of the Cortina and was designed to be Europe’s answer to the hugely successful Ford Mustang. 1.9 million of the pretty coupes were brought in the platform’s life cycle between 1968 and 1986.
The Sierra is the successor of the Cortina and was launched in 1982 and was discontinued in 1993. Like the Cortina it was a wonderful fleet vehicle for businesses and a nice spacious car for families. The Sierra has a significant motorsport heritage in Group A touring cars and rallying.
I chose to do a Capri for this event. For no particular reason I had just planned to do a quick shell. However, Kamtec made such a nice job of the casting and added so much detail that I couldn’t just leave it as a plain shell and so decided to add in all the details to make it a road car!
The car was painted Ford Solar Gold, which was an OEM colour for them. The lights and grill were brush painted in then the bumpers, door handles, badges and number plates were all made on my vinyl cutter.
I also got to use my 1300 which hasn’t seen the light of day in a couple of months. Of course, this has the good old 1300 MG shell.
I only managed to get a few pics of some of the other cars before the racing started I’m afraid. I pitted next to an absolute gentleman by the name of Stuart Tinker who owned this red and black Capri. We had some close racing throughout the night as you will see shortly.
John Hillyard’s Cortina. A Brentwood RC regular and another Gent.
Brentwood’s Sean Foley’s Sierra:
Here we have CCORC’s Koonta with his Cortina banger and Peugeot stock car. Both are amazingly quick.
Ginge’s cars were well presented. I like the swapped around colours!
The matte black and glossy light blue of this 1300 stock car looked nice.
Dave is a face I’ve seen a few times at Brentwood. Here we have his Capri.
This Mk1 Lotus Cortina was absolutely beautifully done. Sadly just for show today though. He wanted to save the car for another meeting.
I managed to get some more pics before the demolition derby but first lets go racing!
In the first round of bangers went really well! I managed to stay out of a lot of the contact. I took 5th with 42 laps, fractions of a second behind Stuart Tinker with the black and red Capri.
The first round of 1300s also went quite well. Sadly I didn’t swap my transponder between the two cars so didn’t score any laps for the race.
In the 2nd race with the bangers I got into a bit more contact and spent a bit of time on my roof and so was only able to score 38 laps. Stuart also got into bother on a couple of occasions so we managed to finish on the same lap again!
Race 2 of the 1300 stock cars. Not an amazing result but at least I remembered to put my transponder in this time haha!
The result of the third round of bangers were a nice surprise! Both Stuart and myself got up on the fence for a while. Someone knocked me free and I tried to knock Stuart free but to no avail. I shot off and he got knocked free a lap or so later. He must have had a really got race to get 43. I was happy with my 40 from that race though!
46 laps in the third round of 1300s was much better! Myself, Tony Sims and the club’s owner Midge all finishing on the same lap.
The stock cars were split into two finals, A and B respectively. I took third in the B final which was a nice result!
The final for the bangers was an all in race, so all 27 bangers were on track. It was chaos but a lot of fun! I finished 14th which I suppose is average haha!
Following the finals was a demolition derby. I didn’t partake but hung around to get some photos of an absolutely monstrous project that Divvy was working on for Kent Carpet Oval’s Birthday meet. That will be getting it’s own dedicated blog post!
I also sneaked on track to get some pics of the cars before they were obliterated in the DD.
Simon (Midge) and Divvy have also invested in some hydrodipping equipment. Looks fantastic on the bangers and doesn’t seem to rub off of the cars too easily.
My Capri held up well. I didn’t do the DD but it didn’t get any real damage until the final when it took a couple of cracks. The Mk3 Capri is another of Kamtec’s shells that I really rate. It’s a really nice, detailed cast and strong enough to last a meet. Not as strong as the Mk4 Supra perhaps, but it still did really well!
Another super day at Brentwood RC! I will be doing a dedicated blog post to Divvy’s project so be sure to like the facebook page (Motorsport For Mental Health) or if you find you don’t get enough junk email you can always subscribe to my mailing list below!
Many thanks for reading! See you next time!
Richard Francis
