ROCKINGHAM’S WIN NUMBER ONE

Here’s one for a pub quiz. Who won the first ever race at Rockingham? If your answer’s Gil de Ferran, the inaugural CART race victor, then I’m afraid you get zero. The first meeting at the new venue was earlier in 2001, in May, and was a BARC-run club event.

And the first winner? Peter Clark in a Mallock, triumphing in a

Clubmans K Sports 1600 race.

The accolade came as a surprise to the man himself, though not for a reason you might assume. “We were the second race,” Clark tells Motorsport News. Indeed the honour of christening Rockingham racing was supposed to go to a BMW contest. But they’d made three unsuccessful attempts at getting underway.

“We were standing around watching the carnage and thinking ‘blimey what are they going to do next time?’” Clark continues. “And the next time was

[the announcement] ‘Clubmans K Sports 1600 next race 10 minutes’!

So there was a lot of running round!”

Clark won as noted, then he got another surprise in parc ferme. “All these people start waving to stop and [my] first thought was ‘what?’ Then I think one of the Clubmans Register organisers was going ‘it’s the first race, it’s the first race win’, [I thought] ‘oh right, OK!’ Because as I say we just hadn’t had it in our minds at all.

“We don’t normally get reporters running up to us, but to have all of these other people with cameras and recording kits running up,

[I’m thinking] ‘who are you? Who do you think I am? What’s going on?’”

And that wasn’t the end of the surprises, as even though this first meeting was meant to not have spectators, some had indeed come along to watch and Clark became the target of autograph hunters wanting to mark his place in history. “It certainly made my friends laugh,” Clark smiles.