On the hottest day the UK has ever experienced I was doing a hillclimb. This isn’t a huge surprise as most of the July Gurston meetings I’ve done have been punishingly hot – I remember the Panda dash showing 38 degrees one year. But this was hotter. I’ve never been to an event where sparks from a car ignited the grass. But this happened every time my batch went up the hill.
Previously in this blog I mentioned that I would have a co-driver for the July event, but didn’t mention why or how. Well the story goes like this. Earlier in the year Mark Aley invited me to a simulator session he’d arranged at Classic Simulators in Farnborough. And to liven thing up he said “if Becky beats your time you let her have a drive in your Formula Ford”. No problem I thought. And then got beaten; only by a little bit, but beaten I was. (Even though I sneaked back and went a tiny bit faster..) And as I’m a man of my word, the drive was Becky’s. A bit of work on calendars and we settled on the July Gurston, which happened to be round 1 of the Pre 94 Formula Ford Championship. A shared drive was something I’d never done before. We did a bit of a shakedown test the week before Gurston at Bicester, which showed me that I had little to worry about – Becky drove well and started to show some pace towards the end. And I enjoyed my time as a sort of low rent Ken Tyrrell.

I did the usual thing and arrived at Gurston on the Friday evening and set up in the farmyard. We kicked off the day with a hill walk with Russ Haynes and prepared for the runs up the hill. I can’t remember a time when this has happened before, but on the Saturday we only got two runs because of a couple of reasonably serious “offs”. With the heat and the off’s it must have been a tough one for the marshalls. For me the main thing was perfecting the driver change over, which had to be done pretty quickly because of the running order. And on the Saturday we kind of got there.


By Sunday we were running the car without assistance and got quite slick with the change overs. In the end we ever remembered to change the numbers. Becky became increasingly rapid, convincing me and anyone who cared to watch that she’s going to make a decent hillclimb driver. And I did a PB, 39.08, though I did miss my target time by 9/100’s. If I can make it into the 38’s in August I’ll be pretty happy.


Dual driving was great fun, though it did highlight a problem with the RF84. It was pretty much on the verge of boiling over most of the time. Mark Haynes suggested that the rad might be blocked, and the fact that the fan did almost nothing to cool the engine backed that theory up. A few years ago, when I thought the rad was leaking, but wasn’t, I commissioned a new rad. But didn’t fit it. Seemed like a good idea now. Another clue to the overheating showed itself when I drained the system. The water was far from crystal clear. In fact it took about 15 gallons of water being flushed through it before it was an acceptable colour.



At the time of writing the rad is in and almost everything is connected. The super expensive coolant that promises to make engines run 20 degrees cooler is also in after I ran the engine with plain water and then drained to complete another cleaning cycle. Soon we’ll see if it has worked.