HSR Daytona – 8th - 11th November 2007

After the pressure of Rennsport the week before, HSR’s race meeting at Daytona the following weekend was a very relaxed affair. The most interesting part of it was that Don Nelson and Bernie Chodosh had organized some thirty racers from Britain’s Historic Sportscar Club to fly over and take part.

Thursday morning, 8 a.m. and the announcer’s voice came over the PA system: “Good morning to the garages, and a very good morning to our British visitors. For those of you who don’t know what it is, that big orange ball in the sky is called ‘the Sun’ and we get quite a lot of it here!” This brought a smile to everyone’s faces and test day went off without incident.

My dear friend Mauro Borella from Milan had flown over to visit with his vivacious companion Stefania (see photos!) and George had assigned his racing Aston Martin DB4 to us for the weekend. After the 935 of “Rennsport”, a very different drive – it was as if someone had broken the elastic band when I got onto the banking but hey, this is what Vintage/Historic motor sport is all about – Mauro and I were very grateful to be able to drive such a lovely car at a great circuit.

The Aston handled pretty well and, despite the fact that neither Mauro nor I trusted the old Smith’s tachometer in it, we managed to post reasonable lap times for our class and were looking forward to the one hour enduro on Sunday.

Meanwhile, everyone else was enjoying their racing as well, with Farrell Preston going well in his TVR Griffiths and David Hinton taking great pleasure in throwing his highly modified Jaguar XK120 FHC around (such car control a delight to watch), whilst Larry Ligas was always in the hunt with his modified E type but could not catch Big block Corvettes on the banking, though he could match them through the infield every time. The only person to give these two Corvettes any worries was Eric Lux in an RSR clone but, despite trying everything he knew, he could not catch the faster of these two.

On Friday afternoon, after expressing our worries about the engine of the Aston blowing up on the banking without really knowing how many revs it was pulling, George had the team install an electronic tacho and that proved (I think!) to be very accurate, even to showing that the old tacho had been over-reading by some 500 revs at 6,000 rpm.

Mauro and I got an eight-lap race apiece and duly won our class and all seemed set for Sunday morning’s Enduro, where we had, in deference to old machinery, decided on a rev limit of 5,500r pm for the Enduro.

Mauro took the start and, as the field streamed away, Mick, Nick, Josh and myself settled down to wait for the pitstop. Trouble was, Mauro didn’t come around again! A track worker got on the radio and told us: “He’s on the inside of NASCAR four, looking under the hood.” Oh dear, we feared the worst but, when Mauro and the Aston returned on the end of a towrope to the garage area, Mauro announced: “It is not serious. The clutch, I think. No drive.” George came over to see what had happened to his car and I put on a grim face and told him: “It’s very serious, I’m afraid George.” His face fell. “What is it?” he asked. “The clock stopped.” I told him. “No, seriously, it’s only the clutch.” He looked somewhat relieved to hear this as the smile appeared back on his face.

Later on, George, Jim Pace and Siggi Brunn were on the podium after the two-hour enduro on Sunday afternoon but by that time, I was home as, after two consecutive weekends of racing, I felt like a little downtime.