August and September are a funny time of the motor racing year. Events come thick and fast as everybody tries to make the most of the summer before things tend to get rather soggy around autumn. The knock-on effect of the fixture congestion is it just goes to show the sheer variety of things there are to do with vintage cars!

The month started off with the VSCC’s Prescott Hill Climb, which is a wonderful event, and I was delighted to see a huge spectator turn-out – with four fields full of people camping ready for a weekend of the action. Prescott is perhaps the most popular event on the VSCC calendar, but from the outside it may be one of our best-kept secrets. I encourage anybody with an interest in vintage cars to go. The atmosphere is electric, the compact paddock is accessible and the spectating fantastic.

My son Ben handled the Parker-GN and won Fastest Young Person (under 30s) and finished second overall Vintage car.

Then came the Stanley Cup, a road event run to mark 100 years of Frazer Nash cars. A total of 78 starters set off in teams of three around Leicestershire and Northamptonshire to take part in ‘special stages’ such as time trials, autotests and similar. Ben Jackson, a competitor in the Stanley Cup and one of the presenters with BBC Radio Leicester, ran a feature on the Stanley Cup and our Mallory Park meeting. His feature inspired many locals to Mallory to come along, which meant we enjoyed a spike in interest and had such an influx of spectators that we ran out of programmes!

At Mallory we had races for Edwardian cars, pre-war sports cars, F3 500s, Austin Sevens, MGs, and even a grid of pre-1966 racing cars. I enjoyed a terrific, but all too brief scrap against Jon Milicevic in his Foglietti, but his car suffered a technical issue and had to retire early, leaving me to win in my Cooper T53. My son Ben was third in his 1960 Cooper T51. I narrowly avoided the podium in the Parker-GN when I lost a pushrod on the last lap. The drive home on three cylinders was amusing!

Then it was on to the Classic at Silverstone where I ran the T53 to fifth and seventh places in a huge grid of 44 cars! After that we squeezed in a quick holiday to Dordogne, a beautiful area of France, wonderfully suited to vintage cars with tight lanes and country roads. This year we took our 1965 Fiat 500 and 1929 Morris Minor tourer. The locals love to see a vintage car. Instead of asking how much the cars are worth, like us Brits do, they always ask ‘quelle vitesse?’, which means ‘how fast?’ – and that always makes me laugh. Busy times!

Next month: On the road to the Spa Six Hours with a trio of competition classics.