Inside line -- Fred Gallagher

Tour Britannia organiser

What has been the reaction to the first Tour Britannia?

Everybody loved the hillclimbs; the view on the airfield stages was fifty-fifty. The races were very popular. Normally you always get niggly complaints about events, but this has been 99.9 per cent hassle-free. The Index of Performance was taken quite seriously too.

What will you change for 2006?

We want to have a race each day and the rest split between hillclimbs and stately homes. One suggestion is to have a two-centre event to open up new venues and reduce road mileage. The regularity crews had a ball driving all the venues and we’ll look at making an even more accessible package for them.

What’s your entry target for ’06?

Ideally 60 competition and 30 regularity starters would be perfect. That would give us two competition grids, maximum. Even if we limit it to 60 cars in competition there will still be space for the Minis and Escorts and cars like that.

What’s the outline for next year?

We’ll keep the event base in the middle of the country and hopefully finish at Silverstone again, as that worked perfectly. Maybe we’d start one day later, on Tuesday, and finish on Friday to give people a chance to get back from See Red at Donington, if that has the same date.

Did the event lose money?

We’d known for a while that with a fairly small starting list we were going to lose a fair bit, but we were determined to establish the event.