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I am aware that the blog has been very quiet this year. Well, I warned you that if it were so, then it would be an indication that I have been busy and somehow this year has been a very busy one indeed. Not just full of motor-racing things, but also with domestic matters. The first thing to mention, for those who care (and I am always amazed how many of you there are) is my health. Thus far, my remission continues. The medication seems to be working and apart from the physical damage that happened to my back in the early stages of my illness, and the consequent restriction of my chest cavity and breathing, I am as strong as I can reasonably expect to be. There have been one or two setbacks during the year, but my immune system has coped and the medical professionals are happy with my condition.

(If you don’t know the background here, I suggest you go back to June and October 2020 and read my posts from then.)

On the domestic front, it has been a year of upheaval as well, since we spent the latter part of 2021 moving house; finally arriving at our new home in December. Practically all my spare time this year has been spent - led for the most part by my hard-working wife - on sorting things out: getting decorating done, buying all manner of new ‘stuff’ and all the sundry activities that go along with settling in to a new house after nigh on thirty years of living in Woking.

But as I have said, it has been busy work-wise as well, and broadly, my work has fallen into three categories: first, writing for sport auto magazine in Germany (as well as a contribution for RaceCar Engineering here); second, doing commentary work for Radio Show Limited and various circuit PA’s around the UK; and third, working in the pit garage for Red Camel Racing in their season-long campaign in Creventic’s 24H Series races. There have been a few other bits and pieces along the way, but I never dreamed, in the depths of my illness in 2020, that I would be well enough to get to so many races as I have this year.

Indeed, there has been far too much going on to cover in a single blog post, and some things I have no wish to talk about here. But I have unexpectedly been occupied doing far more circuit commentary this year, and have enormously enjoyed myself doing so.

Although I have been a motor-racing enthusiast since a very early age, it was through Public Address commentary that I became involved on the ‘inside’ of the sport. I have written about my starting off in commentary before, and I will not to repeat that here, but having been doing Public Address work for forty years it still gives me a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction to spend a day talking into a microphone – even if the audience is often very small. In a sense, doing PA commentary can be regarded as a public duty. As the PA commentator, the ‘tannoy’ is the main link between the race meeting and the spectators that have paid to get in. It is a different experience to talking to a TV or radio audience, where the viewer (or listener) can turn you off and go and do something else. To my mind, you have a responsibility as the commentator to inform people about what is going on, and to help then to enjoy their day. Hopefully, to such an extent, that they might decide to come back again.

Cast your mind back to any the motor-racing that you have ever seen portrayed in a movie or drama on TV. There is always a disjointed voice coming over the tannoy. To me, the tannoy is simply a part of the drama of motor-racing. When the commentator starts shouting, the spectators know that there is drama unfolding before their eyes – they had better pay attention!

The well-equipped box at Woodcote

When I used to go to races and stand in the spectator enclosure, I would always ensure that I was near enough to a loudspeaker to be able to hear the commentary. I used to keep a lap chart and generally stay as close to the racing action as I could. When the commentators missed something, I would want to nudge my neighbour and say, for example: “look out for no. 7, he’s closing in on the no. 3 by a second a lap!” That’s the role of the commentator – to help the casual spectator to understand what they are seeing.

This year, I have commentated from the commentary boxes at Woodcote, Abbey, Stowe and Becketts at Silverstone, as well as at Donington Park, Brands Hatch and Snetterton. I have covered everything from British GT to the Citroen C1 24-hour race, with many club formulae in between. Nearly all of them have been contested by enthusiasts who love their racing, who own and pay for their cars. And mostly the grids have been extremely healthy. Considering where we’ve been in the last two years, it shows that national racing at the club level is very strong indeed.

Having said all of that, the highlight of my year was undoubtedly getting to Le Mans again – as I explained in July in my only other post of this year. In many ways, my approach to “the World’s Greatest Endurance race” is no different to that of a Silverstone club meeting. I want to help people to understand what they are seeing, to get them as excited about it as I am, and hopefully, to get them to return another time. Over the years, the audience for Radio Le Mans has shifted from being purely a radio station broadcasting to those at the circuit, to being an international affair, where the worldwide audience listening online vastly outnumbers those who are actually at the circuit listening in on FM radio receivers.

I was also commentating at Hockenheim this year, for Creventic’s two-part, 12-hour race. It was the first time that I had been to Germany’s ‘other’ circuit, and I am grateful to those who made that trip possible. It has been tricky, on occasions, to squeeze everything in this year, but somehow I have managed it - although the year is not over yet.

I hope that next year can continue in a similar vein – although having said that, the work that I’ve been doing for Red Camel this year has in many ways been more exhilarating. But that will have to be the subject for another blog.