Weekend catch up Part 1

I spent the weekend up in Manchester with my friends Simon (of MG Midget fame) and Ally. What a wonderful weekend it was, catching up, chatting, messing about with Si’s sports car, enjoying tasty food and taking in some motor racing at Oulton Park.

Over the next few days I’ll try and post some of the photos I took of the racing and of the interesting cars parked on the hill overlooking Cascades. Before then I need to share a few observations:

1. The noise limit seems to have been tightened, some cars did not sound as ear-splitting or dramatic as I remembered from past years.
2. What happened to the pre-war cars? Last year there was some pretty good racing from the vintage and post-vintage crowd.
3. Where have all the Jaguars gone? The first Gold Cup meeting I attended had XKs, C-types and D-types racing but they seem to have deserted the Gold Cup.
4. Digital photography of moving cars can be a bit hit and miss. I promise to share some of the more amusingly bad examples.

I’ll leave you with this picture from practice for the Guards Trophy race.

Picture of the Week: A quartet of Quattros

The last time I featured an Audi Quattro it was a rather sad and rundown example. To see a collection of cherished Quattros was therefore a heart warming sight. I took this photo at the Oulton Park Gold Cup meeting. Catching a Quattro on the road is an altogether more difficult proposition. There have only been 2 occasions where I have encountered a Quattro on the road but both of those were opportunities to marvel. Once was on a tightly curving exit ramp from the Coventry ring road. The ramps are concrete with expansion joints running across the carriageway and those joints seem perfectly designed to jolt a car off the road. The Quattro shot down the ramp and the last I saw, following at a more sedate pace, was the tail lights disappearing off into the night. The second encounter was a simple display of speed as a Quattro hurried past on the wide, single carriageway section of the A46 from Alcester to Red Hill.

Weekend Fun 3

Last post about the Oulton Park Gold Cup. I’m not much of a fan of motor racing but it is much better to see racing cars in action on the track rather than static in a museum. You do see some fine displays of driving skill as old racing cars generally have more power than they have roadholding or braking ability. This year some of the more prestigious cars stayed away because the Goodwood Revival was the following weekend. As a result there were no C or D-type Jaguars, no Listers, Ferraris or Corvettes, which was a disappointment given the high standard of entries in past years.

What was interesting was the difference in sound quality between the different engines. The sound of a 4 or 8 cylinder engine carries much more clearly than any six. Subjectively the loudest cars of the weekend were the Chevron sports cars and the Formula 5000 single-seaters. Formula 5000 was an interesting discipline, using Formula 1 chassis but with production-based 5-litre American V8 engines to keep costs down.

Favourite moments of the weekend included watching the historic Formula Junior cars and seeing both a Fiat 124 coupé and a BMW 328 (well, a Frazer-Nash BMW) in action. The Fiat is such a rare car because most examples rusted at a frightening rate – a shame because contemporary accounts rate it highly. As for the BMW, it was the most modern of the pre-war cars – no wonder so many people hold the 328 in high regard.