The COTA 24 hours.

It’s a funny race, the COTA 24 hours. Among the various 24-races that Creventic runs, and of the other 24-hour races that I attend over the course of the year, it is unique; in that it has an “intervention break”, during which the cars are placed in parc fermé conditions on the start-finish straight for the duration of the night. For the second part of the race, which started this year at eight in the morning on Sunday, the cars are lined up in grid formation in the order in which they finished part one, but with the number of laps already completed in part one added to the number of laps that the cars cover in part two.

The entry for this year’s race was slightly down on numbers, with just 29 cars taking the start, compared to 34 last year, or 41 the year before. In the race for overall victory, it was going to be a tall order indeed for anyone to beat the Black Falcon Mercedes of Jeroen Bleekemolen, Felipe Fraga, Ben Keating and Cooper MacNeil and so it turned out in reality. After the eleven hours of part one, the WeatherTech-sponsored car had completed 278 laps, and was a lap ahead of the nearest competition. There were only two cars within five laps of the Black Falcon car – Toksport’s similar Mercedes AMG GT3 and the ever-efficient Herberth crew in their Porsche 911 GT3-II.

In the second, fourteen-hour segment of the race, the Toksport car fell down the order with suspension maladies, leaving the chase to Herberth, but Robert and Alfred Renauer, ably assisted by Ralf Bohn and Daniel Alleman (winners in 2017) had neither the pace, nor the luck of the Code-60 periods, to represent any kind of threat.

Undoubtedly it was a great team effort by everyone on the Black Falcon crew, and congratulations are due to all concerned, to team manager Sean Paul Breslin, to race engineer Renaud Dufour and to all the mechanics, but inevitably, the attention is focussed on the drivers – after all, they are the ones who stood on the podium at the end of the race.

It is always interesting to examine the individual performances of the drivers – especially as there was some banter before the race about whether Jeroen Bleekemolen (ranked by Creventic as a PRO) was really quicker than Felipe Fraga (who is a Semi-Pro).

Analyses of this type are always fraught with danger, since unquestionably the pace slowed towards the end of the race as the lead of the Mercedes was pretty unassailable. But here, for what it is worth, is the data for each stint of the winning Black Falcon car:

Stint	Driver	Driving Time	Average	Best	Theoretical
1	Felipe Fraga	1h 06m 51.479s	2m 09.388s	2m 07.160s	2m 06.774s
2	Jeroen Bleekemolen	1h 24m 33.042s	2m 09.952s	2m 08.676s	2m 08.126s
3	Ben Keating	1h 10m 21.185s	2m 11.938s	2m 10.816s	2m 09.389s
4	Cooper MacNeil	1h 09m 12.944s	2m 12.622s	2m 10.947s	2m 10.669s
5	Felipe Fraga	1h 06m 51.479s	2m 09.388s	2m 07.160s	2m 06.774s
6	Felipe Fraga	1h 06m 51.479s	2m 09.388s	2m 07.160s	2m 06.774s
7	Jeroen Bleekemolen	1h 24m 33.042s	2m 09.952s	2m 08.676s	2m 08.126s
8	Ben Keating	1h 10m 21.185s	2m 11.938s	2m 10.816s	2m 09.389s
9	Felipe Fraga	1h 06m 51.479s	2m 09.388s	2m 07.160s	2m 06.774s
10	Felipe Fraga	1h 06m 51.479s	2m 09.388s	2m 07.160s	2m 06.774s
11	Felipe Fraga	1h 06m 51.479s	2m 09.388s	2m 07.160s	2m 06.774s

INTERVENTION BREAK

Stint	Driver	Driving Time	Average	Best	Theoretical
12	Jeroen Bleekemolen	20m 06.535s	2m 07.558s	2m 07.219s	2m 06.993s
13	Jeroen Bleekemolen	47m 50.142s	2m 08.722s	2m 06.747s	2m 06.617s
14	Felipe Fraga	1h 08m 59.325s	2m 09.475s	2m 08.201s	2m 07.898s
15	Cooper MacNeil	1h 12m 16.619s	2m 11.416s	2m 09.691s	2m 09.479s
16	Jeroen Bleekemolen	1h 11m 33.830s	2m 10.201s	2m 08.454s	2m 08.269s
17	Ben Keating	1h 14m 24.108s	2m 11.314s	2m 10.115s	2m 09.449s
18	Felipe Fraga	1h 14m 12.654s	2m 10.331s	2m 09.005s	2m 08.511s
19	Jeroen Bleekemolen	54m 09.090s	2m 10.053s	2m 08.439s	2m 08.405s
20	Jeroen Bleekemolen	52m 07.434s	2m 09.916s	2m 08.369s	2m 08.120s
21	Cooper MacNeil	1h 23m 46.086s	2m 13.848s	2m 11.771s	2m 11.643s
22	Felipe Fraga	1h 14m 35.039s	2m 11.738s	2m 09.360s	2m 09.293s
23	Ben Keating	40m 34.887s	2m 17.553s	2m 13.285s	2m 12.421s

Looking at the two parts aggregated together, gives us the following:

Driver	Green Laps	Average	Best
Felipe Fraga	205	2m 08.268s	2m 07.160s
Jeroen Bleekemolen	177	2m 08.259s	2m 06.747s
Ben Keating	114	2m 10.732s	2m 10.015s
Cooper MacNeil	100	2m 09.691s	2m 10.812s

In this table “Average” means the average of the best 20% of the Green Flag laps completed in either part. I think you have to agree that there isn’t much to choose between Bleekemolen and Fraga. Next year, according the FIA, the Brazilian will move up to “Gold” category. That’s where the Dutchman already is. I can’t see that he can argue with that one!

Proper racing...

If I spent most of July and early August travelling to and from Belgium for 24-hour races, and September at Silverstone to commentate for various race meetings (International GT Open, MSVR VW FunCup, Mazda MX-5 SuperCup and the Ferrari “Corse Clienti” Festival), then October and early November were very different again.

I spent consecutive weekends commentating at the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch, followed by the Walter Hayes Trophy meeting at Silverstone. Both meetings are feasts of FF1600 entertainment – the “Festival” on the Brands Indy circuit and the Walter Hayes on Silverstone’s National circuit layout. And both are two-day extravaganzas in which the scoring of championship points can be forgotten and all-out racing is the order of the day.

For readers that are not familiar with FF1600, my only question is, why not? The concept was created in 1967 by John Webb, at Brands Hatch, as a low-cost entry formula into motorsport, initially for cars powered by 1500cc Ford Cortina engines, but swiftly uprated to the 1600cc Kent engine. The idea was that the cars would run on road tyres, and there is no doubt at all that in the first 25 years of its life it played a role in the career of virtually all racing drivers on their climb up the single-seater ladder.

For many years in the 1980’s I was lucky enough to witness the festival from the commentary box, and see such as Tommy Byrne, Johnny Herbert, Eddie Irvine and others take the winner’s trophy. Later, drivers such as Jenson Button, Anthony Davidson and Mark Webber also lifted the title. Truly it was a springboard to better things.

The Walter Hayes is a somewhat later creation; thanks entirely to the efforts and vision of James Beckett, and nowadays – arguably – attracts a stronger entry than the festival. In my view, Silverstone is a better circuit for FF1600 racing. Certainly, it is a simpler layout, which makes it easier for newcomers to learn.

When I was first involved in motor racing and attending national race meetings all over the country, one of my greatest pleasures was spotting talented young drivers progressing through the ranks. Drivers like David Coulthard, Allan McNish, Martin Brundle, to name but a few. Things are different now, but two things in particular strike me: one, that so many talented drivers are now ‘stuck’ in Formula Ford, with neither the budget to progress up the ladder, nor the profile to be picked up by the marketeers that control the sport these days. But also, looking further up the scale, outright talent behind the wheel doesn’t seem to count as much these days. A healthy wallet or a wealthy backer will far better ensure your progress as a career racing driver.

Anyway, if you have a heart for club racing in the UK, you will know that Jonathan Browne won the Formula Ford Festival and Jordan Dempsey the Walter Hayes Trophy. Both are from the Republic of Ireland, and it was great to see the enthusiastic fervour with which their countrymen greeted both winners. With Ireland also carrying off the Festival World Cup at Brands Hatch, I am surprised that Ireland is not regarded (as for example, Brazil or Finland are) as a hotbed of motor-racing talent. The reason? The economy. There’s a message there for us all, but what we do about it, I have no idea.

Immediately following the Walter Hayes Trophy meeting, I was off to Anglesey for the Race of Remembrance. Again, there may be readers that are not familiar with this event, but for this you can surely be forgiven, since this is a motor sport event like no other. First run in 2014, it has gone from strength to strength, and this year attracted 44 entries, some of which were relay teams using more than one car, but for the most part, competitors were after the “Heroes Trophy” for single-car teams.

But that is not true either, because the Race of Remembrance is not a race that people enter in order to win. Sure, racing drivers are competitive, and try to show who’s best, but it is participation in the event that is key. It is run by Mission Motorsport, the forces’ charity that aims to help rehabilitate former servicemen and women who have all manner of physical and mental disabilities. Their motto is “Race, retrain, recover”, and they do not limit themselves to getting disabled drivers into racing cars. An important part of what they do is to give people jobs around the car, in the race team, driving the truck. Step by step, the approach is to put people back on their feet.

The centrepiece of the Race of Remembrance is the Remembrance Service, held in the pit lane. Racing stops, people come to pause, reflect, remember, pray, sing some hymns and then we go racing again. Sounds simple, but you need to be there to properly experience the poignancy of the moment.

At the same time as all that was going on, the World Endurance Championship was having the third race of their 2019-20 season at Shanghai, China. A long way to go for a four-hour race, and the ACO’s “Success Handicap” was really beginning to bite. At least it was if you were Toyota. Sure enough, as many had predicted, the singleton Rebellion finally got the upper hand in terms of performance, and led the two works hybrid cars home.

When I wrote a month or so ago about the benefits of handicaps in motor sport, this was not quite what I had in mind as a formula for success. To handicap a car such that it is not able to go as fast as it is supposed to go is surely short-changing everyone? Not only the spectators, who can’t appreciate what a good car the Toyota TS050 is, but the drivers, who can only extract as much performance as the handicap allows.

What is exciting – for drivers and spectators alike – is to watch a car charging up through the field. Why can’t the handicap be imposed in such a way that Toyota has to finish the race two laps ahead, in order to win the race?

At Silverstone, in the Walter Hayes Trophy, Michael Moyers, winner for the last two years, clashed with Joey Foster (a three-time winner) in the heat, leaving both with back-of-grid starts for the “progression race”. Moyers fought back through “Progression”, “Last Chance” and “Semi-final”, to take second place at the end of the Grand Final. It was thrilling stuff. I am sure he would have won the event easily without that incident, and although it wasn’t an externally imposed handicap, it made for a great spectacle. When I spoke to him about it afterwards, he was obviously disappointed, but nevertheless he knew the extent of his achievement and took satisfaction from that.