MG Car Club International Festival

[John Turner]

Starters:- 31
Classified:- 20

Our historic Inter-Marque race over 30 minutes with a compulsory pitstop. I've called it 10(A) because starting 40 seconds behind this field were the cars of MGCC 'Iconic 50's' and I will do a few pics for them also. What it boiled down to was a fantastic array of cars since it meant nearly 50 cars starting.

We had an absolutely superb looking grid, which for the first time included a Chairman's Invitation class of non compliant (but still very in period) FISCAR cars. The start of the race was marred by an incident which left 5 cars damaged including two Porsches, an Aston, an XK and an MGA. Later on towards the end of the race another car blew its engine leaving a trail of oil round the track leading to another accident into the pitwall. Everyone has a view and no-one likes to take the blame but I do have an opinion and frankly am not happy about how either of these were caused, since they were both avoidable.

The race was won on the road by Brian Arculus in his Lotus Elite (77 -he is the man to beat at the moment) chased home at a respectful distance by 3 Austin Healey 100 (2 x 100M and 1 x 100/4) with Andrew Sharp's DB2 in close attendance. However we were concentrating on team awards here and whilst you will see that the Healey's were packed at the front, the performance handicapping meant that they were pipped for top honours by the Scuderia Italia Team of Peter Shaw (111 - Alfa Guilietta Sprint - 8th), Jason and Louise Kennedy (19 - Lancia Aurelia B20GT - 12th) and James Wiseman (10 - Alfa Guilietta SZ 13th), so very well done to them. My concern at the potential pace of the Chairman's class proved unfounded - Pia Bianchi, driving well within herself and delayed by the startline incident carefully picking her way to 10th, in the Farrallac, Chris Guest, running the RGS Atlalanta (198) for the first time since it's rebuild and clearly finding his way on set up finished 14th and Malcolm Verey who was on course for about 5th or 6th had sadly to retire as the footwell in his Allard J2 was filling with oil. It was great to see a number of first timers out in our series. I will add some more pics later.

[SZRacer]

Thanks for the report on the FISCAR race, John! Yes, it was a truly magnificent grid of cars, even if not all of them finished! And, yes, somehow us Italophiles managed to win on handicap (not sure how, but who am I to argue!)

I should point out for correctness, though, that the name of our team was Scuderia Bunga Bunga.

[John Turner]

Ah, yes, I forgot but in my defence read it straight off the race results which still refer to you as Scuderia Italia!

More FISCAR pics:-

[John Turner]

A few morepics. It is only fair to say that the MGAs appearing in these pics were running in the separate MGCC Iconic 50's race but are entirely suitable and would be most welcome on the FISCAR grids:-

[John Turner]

Starters - 16
Classified - 11

I'll finish this rather sporadic and truncated coverage of this meeting with a few pics from the MGCC's Iconic 50s field of cars. The race for the lead was close fought one between John Bussey and Jeff Marsden, both in hot MG TCs, with Bussey taking the flag by half a second. The interesting selection of XPAG specials was led home by Alex Quattlebaum's MG Leco 2 (17) which finished 3rd overall and just 3 seconds down on the leading pair.