The new Tony Jones Trophy goes to the overall winner of the six VSCC driving test series (Gareth Tarr).
previous evening’s film night of an octogenarian VSCC member who was giving up driving tests because he could no longer remember the routes… but he was continuing racing of course!
Given a choice from the competing cars of one to take away many of us would no doubt select something exotic, such as Edmund Burgess’s Bugatti, Nick Bell’s Amilcar or Alex Pilkington’s Alfa Romeo. Don’t trust one of those foreign jobs? Then maybe one of the nine MGs would take your fancy or a Frazer Nash, possibly a Riley (choice of seven) or Neil Thorp’s handsome Singer Nine sports coupé.
Despite such desirable machinery, the winner for the second year running was George Diffey in his Austin Seven, showing that when it comes to driving tests, power isn’t everything. Does he get to keep the cup if he wins next year? Well maybe not, but new for 2017, the overall winner of the VSCC’s six driving test events gets the Tony Jones Trophy. The next round is at Silverstone in April – see
www.vscc.co.uk for further details of all of the club’s events.
Despite it being the middle of winter, many owners brought out their pre-war classics to display in the Paddock. An early ‘flat-nose’ MG saloon was an interesting contrast to all the sports cars from the marque in competition. Dodge is not a name normally associated with Brooklands, but the 1920s two-seater was a welcome sight,
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This Dodge badge created some discussion (Gareth Tarr).
sporting it’s intricate badge that included what many thought was a ‘Star of David’. Actually the Dodge brothers weren’t Jewish but the badge denotes that this is a pre-1932 car; Chrysler hav- ing bought the company by then and changing to a ram image.
Part of the tradition of the VSCC weekend is the film evening on the Saturday night and this year it included a rare piece of colour film from the 1936 JCC International Trophy and monochrome images taken from a plane flying over the Byfleet Banking, aircraft hangars andThompson and Taylor works. The Dunlop film Endurance Fantasy of Le Mans was a curious mix of serious footage of the great race and land speed record successes (on the manufacturer’s tyres of course) interwoven with a corny romantic story with ham acting – has there ever been good acting in a motor racing film? The second half of the film evening featured two films about BRM, narrated by Rivers Fletcher.
Next year the Re-engineering project will be complete and VSCC competitors will have the opportunity to experience new tests on the re-opened parts of the Finishing Straight. Will this extra space give the more powerful exotics the chance to out-gun Mr Diffey’s little Austin? Better make a date for late January 2018 to find out.
Gareth Tarr
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