VSCC overhauls race programme

The Vintage Sports Car Club has unveiled the biggest ever evolution of the club’s annual race programme for 2009.

In order to encourage more regular competition between cars of a similar performance, the club has split its categories into six groups, and each group will have races at all of the VSCC’s five meetings this year.

The new groups are Vintage Racing Cars, Pre-58 Front-Engined Racing Cars, Standard and Modified Pre-War Sports, Special Pre-War Sports, Allcomers Scratch Race and Allcomers Handicap Race. The last two groups will be split into slow and fast grids.

“I’ve been thinking for a while that we need to reorganise our racing,” said the club’s Mike Stripe. “We ended up with grids that didn’t make a lot of sense, so what we’ve tried to do is put our competitors into logical groupings that they can stay with for the whole season. What concerned me was that you could sometimes end up in a race with no real structure to it, particularly the short scratch races.”

The new groupings are designed to encourage drivers to race more often, knowing that they will be competing against relatively similar cars. All the club’s existing trophy races will be accommodated into the new framework.

The VSCC has trimmed a day from its racing calendar by dropping the Donington meeting to one day only for 2009. “It’s a big financial risk for the club and we don’t feel that the economic situation is right,” said Stripe.