Rules of the game
What the FIA’S Appendix K brings to the historic-racing party
One prominent historic racer recently said: “If you ask 200 people in the paddock what historic racing should be, you’ll get 200 answers.” The question of how original a historic car should be is a controversial one. Cars used regularly have to be maintained, and crashed cars need to be rebuilt. Which parts and materials should be used can be a complex debate.
Too puritanical about it and some cars will never run reliably, while others will be left in the garage due to a scarcity of parts. Too liberal and it can turn into an arms race that results in cars that look like historic cars but are essentially modern machines. As Historic Sports Car Club CEO Grahame White says: “There are people with vast amounts of money who are desperate to win and explore every avenue.”
Most would agree that the latter isn’t what historic racing should be about – if you want to push the technological boundaries, you should probably be in contemporary motorsport.
Getting that balance right is the job of the many clubs and race promoters, but the FIA has its own answer in the form of Appendix K. In basic terms, Appendix K requires things to be as authentic to the period as possible, with sympathetic safety enhancements thrown in – seatbelts, fire extinguishers, safety tanks. Even where items are listed as ‘free’, that is in relation to the parts and materials that would have been available at the time the car was current. Owners and preparers can’t just bolt modern equipment on.
Once Appendix K cars have their Historic Technical Passport, they can, in theory, race anywhere those regulations are used.
That, in turn, can help those running meetings.
Motor Sports Association eligibility scrutineer Nigel Edwards believes Appendix K has a number of advantages. “It’s so much easier to police and keep the playing field level,” says Edwards, who is the Historic Formula 2 scrutineer, among several other HSCC series. “Appendix K is about avoiding an arms race.
“Quite a few cars are maintained abroad and it doesn’t matter where you are, it’s the same Appendix – it’s a common standard and consistent. It’s organised quite well. There are very few times where it doesn’t tell you what you need to know.”
Using Appendix K also means pre-1966 cars do what they should do: slide around. That’s important for safety as well as the spectacle. “It’s originality that’s important,” adds Edwards. “If you stick to those
regulations you get cars that go sideways and drift. If you put sticky tyres on old suspension, it breaks. It’s far better that the tyres slide than the suspension snaps.”
Keeping the rubber close to the period specifications is key. “The tyre is the limiting factor to performance,” says Dunlop’s James Bailey. “You can give a car more power or better suspension, but if you can’t put it on the track it’s wasted.
“If we were to put a modern tyre on a Lotus Cortina, for example, it could probably lap Silverstone 10 seconds faster, but you’d start to have problems with chassis flexing, suspension, brakes… all because of the extra grip.
“The appeal of historics is people seeing overtaking and cars twitching. Having a modern tyre would change all that. It would be like putting wings on.”
As with any set of regulations, Appendix K only works as well as it is applied. For it to succeed, cars need to be scrutineered properly and tough decisions sometimes need to be made. That can be particularly tricky if a wealthy competitor has several cars at one event, or if there are teams and preparers coming from contemporary motorsport.
“They have higher levels of knowledge,” says Edwards. “There could be parts in the engine using metallurgy you’d only find out about if it blew. To keep a lid on it you need a bunch of historicsfocused scrutineers – and you need support. Once you say something is wrong, you need support from the club and the organisers. And you have to be consistent and treat all competitors the same.”
Using Appendix K is not the only way to run a successful historic racing series – plenty of categories, such as the HSCC’S own Road Sports championships, run perfectly well without it. But it is a useful international method of preserving some of motorsport’s history on track – one that comes from the sport’s governing body, which underlines how seriously it takes this branch of the sport.