Club column: Matt Beer

At its peak, Castle Combe Formula Ford 1600 encapsulated everything that makes club racing special. Here’s hoping the glory days aren’t all in the past

Nostalgia’s deceptive, isn’t it? A memory from a pivotal moment of the first summer of your career isn’t going to be accurate 20 years on, surely? The racing won’t really have been that good, the field won’t really have been that big. It probably wasn’t even sunny.

But I’m still certain the quality of the racing and the size of the grid in Castle Combe Formula Ford 1600 on Saturday August 8 1998 were real, and so was the sunburn. Sadly, though Luke Cooper and Josh Fisher did their very best to entertain in the most recent 2018 round, I don’t think the eight-car field they headed will be fondly reminisced about come summer 2038.

Of all the motorsport I saw in my frantic first summer of freelancing for Autosport, Motoring News (as it was then) and the Western Gazette as a 17-year-old, it was Combe FF1600 that most bewitched – watching from the crest of Avon Rise as Gavin Wills (the narrow winner) and Kevin Mills returned to take on 1998’s big guns Richard Carter and Robin Parsons, and future champion John Hutchinson’s mid-lead-pack spin at Quarry helped Adrian Cottrell’s Class B Van Diemen onto the podium. That huge field slipstreaming, fanning out, wheelbanging and skittering past me was the point when club racing’s magic of normal people with normal lives but a rather extraordinary, ultra-intense, fractious and endearingly messy weekend hobby really hit me. It wasn’t a coincidence I’d one day choose a Combe FF1600 race and the crest of Avon Rise for my future wife’s first experience of live motorsport.

So, yes, Combe FF1600 really was that good. It had been long before 1998, and would be for a long time afterwards.

Even as its grids shrunk from the highs of needing qualification heats to the mid-teens, it remained tough: the 2017 Walter Hayes Trophy battle came down to Combe title rivals Michael Moyers and Fisher. Even the slender field Cooper’s beaten all year has included champions Fisher, Roger Orgee and Matt Rivett, the rapid Felix Fisher and David Vivian, plus National frontrunners Michael Eastwell and Hugo Bentley-ellis, just never all at the same time as Combe FF1600 became the standby filler option, not the‘must-do’.

There was little consensus in the Combe paddock on why the series has fallen and how to save it.

National and Heritage Fford have definitely scooped up drivers who would’ve been Combe regulars before. Relationships with organisers at Combe definitely hit new heights of fractiousness in recent years, and that didn’t make the series seem appealing to the outside. Neither does an eight-car field. The best time to arrest a series’ decline is before that decline becomes visually obvious, and that point has passed.

There has always been change at Combe as families’lives move on or drivers fancy racing further afield. But lately there’s only been a slow trickle of fresh racers onto the grid, not the flow that’s run pretty much incessantly from the

Combe championship’s creation in the second year of FF1600’S existence in 1968 until the mid-2010s. Wider fan habits have changed too. Events such as car shows, Rallyday, the Autumn Classic and the motorcycle meeting are now huge draws for Combe, shading the‘normal’race meetings. Many of those first discovering Combe aren’t discovering FF1600 at the same time.

For every resuscitation move advocated, from entry-fee cuts to emulating other Fford series’mazda Road to Indy tie-ups, you’ll find someone else convinced that’s not the answer. Some emphasise that all is now more cordial between the paddock and organisers others argue that’s because a small field and an affable runaway championship leader aren’t a challenge to manage.

There is hope. Wiltshire College’s free 2019 drive shootout should bring new blood and attention. Teams still report enquiries from newcomers. Some pledge they’ll keep a toe in Combe FF1600 out of emotional loyalty to its reputation, even if they’re not doing a full season, even if they’re frustrated with it, all the time there’s at least one other quick person to race. Some feel the Combe crowds and paddock atmosphere aren’t what they were, yet recent converts from other series argue both are way better than they experienced elsewhere.

Fifty years is an astonishingly good run for a one-circuit championship. Combe FF1600 survived as its once-mighty peers such as Star of Mallory and the original Champion of Brands folded. If it ended now, it could still do so with honour. But it still feels like it was too good, too recently for that to be its fate just yet. And I promise there’s some logical reasoning behind that, not just self-indulgent career anniversary nostalgia. I’m not the only person who probably wouldn’t be still involved in motorsport if Combe FF1600 hadn’t shown me how good motorsport could be.

“FIFTY YEARS IS AN ASTONISHINGLY GOOD RUN FOR A ONE-CIRCUIT SERIES”