This Vintage Sports Car Club race meeting was for the Shuttleworth, Nuffield, and Len Thompson trophies and was held on a chilly day in the middle of June (typical for mid-summer in the UK!). This should be the hottest time of the year, but when I stepped out of my car on arrival, the temperature was 12 degrees (53 F), and it was chucking it down with rain. My Hawaiian shirt was quickly covered by a jacket and waterproof layer.
Cadwell Park is a delightful undulating circuit (sometimes referred to as the “mini-Nurburgring”) in the county of Lincolnshire, close to the North Sea coast. The vast majority of Lincolnshire is absolutely flat, being fen-land, or drained land reclaimed from the sea over the centuries. However, there is an area of fairly low, undulating hills known as ‘the Wolds” and this is where the circuit is. It is a really beautiful place, primarily given over to excellent farmland, a mixture of arable crops, sheep and a few cattle are the circuit’s neighbors. A brief history can be found here.
Despite the very unusual Covid situation this year (the UK has been in and out of lock-downs and restrictions both on a National and Regional basis) the VSCC has managed to run a pretty good selection of events; the first few without any spectators; more recently with limited access areas to avoid over-crowding. For example, spectators cannot enter the paddock, which is always one of the highlights of any Vintage meeting. This is obviously a disappointment but on the grand scale of things, to be able to witness the excellent day’s racing was an absolute delight. There was not a single dull race all day!
The rest of the season’s events are detailed here. I shall endeavor to report from more of the circuit races and hill-climbs and possibly a couple of trials too.
I am primarily a photographer but hope that I’ll be able to string the odd few words together too plus I’ll give links to various other sources of information, for example, here are the comprehensive results from the VSCC website.
I think that gives a far better overview than anything your humble scribe to bash together!
There were ten quite varied races on the card; standard and modified cars were catered for along with vintage racing cars, pre-war MGs, all-comers handicap, Frazer Nash, Riley handicap, pre-1935 Grand Prix cars, VSCC Specials (which I think is a new category for this year), an all-comers Handicap race and finally an all-comers scratch race.
With such a variety of categories, several car/driver combinations made more than one appearance; this means that one might see them competing against a different set of opponents and machinery across the course of the afternoon.
The word Vintage appears to mean different things around the world depending on which version of the English language you are using- in the UK it means between the years of 1920 and 1931 (as I understand it!), in the USA it appears to cover a much wider range, including what we in the UK would call “Classics” but I don’t know where the cut-off date is and as for Australia and New Zealand, perhaps someone could enlighten me?
This year sees the 100th anniversary of the Bugatti Brescia, and there were around a dozen present at the event, these delightful little Grand Prix cars must have been something quite ahead of their time back then, and it was great to see one racing, still, I believe wearing most of the original paint!
I hope you enjoy the photographs; feel free to comment or ask questions and please have a look at my website where there are several galleries of motorsports images dating back to the late 1960s (plus a lot of other stuff too!). again, feel free to comment.
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Great Shots Pete! Sometimes cloudy days are the best days to shoot races. Looks like a great event!