HOW CASTLE COMBE REMAINS KING
Castle Combe circuit not only celebrates 70 years in 2020, two of its championships – saloons and GTS – mark important milestones this year too. Graham Keilloh looks into the secrets of their success
If you attend a race meeting at Castle Combe, it doesn’t take long to realise that it is no ordinary race meeting. There’s the warm and vibrant atmosphere. Large grids and spectator banks filled with rather more people than are normally expected for a club event. The rapid and unforgiving track.
Yet even more, what strikes is the local scene. Close to uniquely, the timetable is replete with four healthy circuit-based categories.
And with these, the proof of the pudding is in the longevity. The muchloved circuit this year celebrates its 70th anniversary, while last season the Castle Combe Formula Ford championship hit its half century. This year two more Combe championships reach significant milestones.
The Castle Combe GT championship marks its 45th birthday – as while the circuit-based Special GT series was first held in 1982, its roots trace to Combe’s Special Saloon Car championship which ran from 1975 to ’81. And the current Castle Combe Saloon championship also reaches 25 years.
Both milestones are intended to be marked this year at Combe race meetings, though the circuit’s racing club, like everyone else, has had to put asterisks next to its plans due to the coronavirus-related disruption.
With both, the plan is to gather its past champions to join current drivers at a particular race meeting this season, as was done to mark the FF1600 championship’s anniversary last year. While the GTS’ 45 years will also be marked with a strongly Gt-themed race meeting.
So what is Castle Combe’s secret? The alchemy seems somewhat a mystery even to its most loyal attendees. “I’ve raced in other championships and things and, I don’t know, there’s something with Castle Combe that they just seem to have got it right,” Combe Saloon and GT champion Gary Prebble tells MN. “Whether [it’s] the rules and regulations in their series or something, it just works.
“The people in the championship seem to do it year in year out. There’s got be something there? It speaks for itself.
“The way that it’s run is perhaps not so corporate,” Prebble continues of the family-run venue. “Some of the bits are a little old fashioned, you think ‘I wish I had some pit garages or had some electric around the paddock’! There’s a few things you think ‘come on guys you need to get up with the times a little bit!’
“But just the atmosphere of the way that it’s run [is what sets it apart]. It’s so friendly to the point of laid back, obviously not safety-wise laid back but the atmosphere and the way that is done is more laid back. You know you can ring up, you can talk to people and generally just get to speak to all the right people when you want to.”
And with the apparent conundrum of Combe’s success, veteran racer Brian Cox reckons “the answer is very easy, because all the other circuits, they operate by going through the British Automobile Racing Club, the 750 Motor Club or the British Racing and Sports Car Club, and it’s more impersonal. It’s very personal at Castle Combe and you get to know a lot of people if you’re going there regularly. If you’re doing a multi-circuit championship you’re moving around, you don’t really get too matey with other drivers.”
Twice GT and Saloon champion Ilsa Cox – who also is married to Brian – concurs: “[It’s] family run, we’ve got to know [the late] Howard, Pat, Emma [Strawford] really well over the years, so it’s like almost having another family.
“The atmosphere in the whole of the paddock if you’ve been going to Combe for a few years is fantastic and you get to know so many people. You often quite know their family, even if they’re not in your class and you’re not directly racing against them you have a good old giggle. It’s just such a lovely friendly place to be.”
Simon Thornton-norris, who has won three of the last four Combe Saloon titles, says similar: “I’ve done a lot of national racing [at other circuits], and you struggle at most venues to get the atmosphere you get at Castle Combe, from the competitors, the paddock, and the spectators as well.
“They are very welcoming to people, they try and allow competitors in, whereas some other series or other places, they don’t want a newcomer coming along and find reasons to exclude them for some technical infringements or make the infringements up.”
Yet Brian Cox reckons, even so, there is more to it. “They’ve hit the button on picking championships that people want to race in,” he says. “The Saloons has been a major hit for them ever since it was introduced in 1995, [and] they’ve just introduced, or is it three years now, the Hot Hatch. People can build the cars and they don’t spend that [large] amount of money, and they’re well disciplined, you know what the regulations are.”
Regulations indeed are a major factor in Combe’s success – framed to be simple and stable, and to ensure cost effectiveness.
Thornton-norris notes: “The engines are quite free and [there is] very restricted suspension, tyres and basically no aero – there’s massive entries. So [it’s] sensible regulations, high entries and really really competitive and you have a good fun local circuit.”
And once again the proof is in the pudding, this time in grid numbers particularly for Saloons. “You can’t get bigger grids in the country,” Ilsa Cox explains. “The only grid that challenges that is the CNC Heads, but the Saloon car championship has been amazing the way the grids have stayed big for decades. Not just years, decades.”
Prebble agrees: “The Saloons [regulations] I think have never really changed too much, their main objective was to try and keep it cost-effective racing. And that’s the bit that’s really worked for them, as long as I can remember the Saloons have always been packed, the grids are always full,
they’ve never really struggled for numbers. That speaks for itself. The way that the class structure is done, I think that’s what keeps [people in], you can decide how much you want to spend.”
Thornton-norris believes stability, as well as listening to drivers, is key. “The regulations are left alone,” he says. “They very slowly tweak them as and when required. When a tyre runs out they have to change tyre regulations slightly as happened a couple of years ago. They’re tight in some areas and not in others, but there’s no ambiguity about it, it’s clear what the regulations are.
“[Also] there’s not 10 classes in the race, there’s four. And although that’s a number it’s easy for everyone to see where they slot into those classes and within the race. I think a lot of series struggle with too many classes and then you get fewer entries per class and you just turn up and you could win.
“They listen to everyone, they take a forum between the drivers and ask people what they want and what they think and how’s it gone and how it can be improved.”
It applies to the GT championship too. “It’s probably one of the most economic championships to run in, in terms of GT cars,” notes GT competitor Jordan Billinton. “If you upgrade to GT Cup or Britcar the cost just goes through the roof.
“[It’s] very competitive. There were one or two very very quick cars [last season]. We had a Mclaren there, there’s the Noble at the front, we’ve got a couple of [Mitsubishi] Evos, and the big Dodge Viper, so that’s some serious bits of kit.”
Twice GT class champion Bradley John adds: “There’s been a good selection of competition, we all have a battle together.”
Combe’s success is matter of geography too, with the Wiltshire track well placed to pick up enthusiasts from much of the south of England, particularly the south-west, as well as Wales.
“It tends to attract local drivers,” notes Ilsa Cox. “There aren’t many that travel even as far as we do [from Hove]. Combe because of where it is it’s got quite a big radius, within it you’ve got Bristol, then going east you’ve got the Swindon area all the way down the M4 corridor, it’s quite a wealthy part of the world as well.
“People travel, come up from the West Country which isn’t too far for them to do some racing if you’re on a similar budget to us and it’s basically what you can afford to do and to then be able to do such good racing with big grids, they’ve got it made.”
And of course there is the quality of the Combe circuit itself. “I’ve been to a few other circuits but they’re very different and I keep coming back to Castle Combe,” notes Billinton. “All I can say is when you approach Avon Rise at sort of 150, 160[mph] and you have to turn in go over the brow and everything goes light and then slam the brakes on, that’s quite a feeling, and there’s not many tracks that can give you that.”
Prebble reckons too that the track’s characteristics have a wider benefit.
“It’s good clean racing, I’ve never really had a run in with anybody,” he says. “The driving standards have always been exceptional and I think a lot of people respect that for what the circuit is, there’s no you huge run-off areas, it’s quite a ballsy circuit because you haven’t got loads of gravel traps, if you come off you’re hitting a barrier. And I think people respect that at
Castle Combe and it seems to attract good driving in general.”
And in the final proof of the pudding, when you ask Combe competitors what can be done to improve the championships, they struggle. “I don’t really know,” Thornton-norris says for one. “They’ve got it pretty spot on. I can’t sit here now and think there would be something they could do to improve the racing, the spectacle for the people watching or the competitors.”
As Prebble concludes: “Don’t try and fix something that’s not broken.”