Cash prize to boost GT championship
Castle Combe GT grids are rarely of the scale of its Saloon cousin.
This stands to reason, given GT cars’ greater expense and lower reliability. One man, at least, is not content to leave it at that however.
Last year there was the rarest of things in modern-day club racing. A race with prize money. Combe’s GT Challenge has a winner’s purse of £1000 put up by Jordan Billinton, a Combe GT competitor and founder of building consultancy ME7. The race’s second running was planned this year for the early-july meeting.
Billinton started racing relatively late in life, in late 2017 having passed his 50th birthday. Before that he was a long-time Gt-loving spectator at Combe, despite not being local. “I suppose Snetterton or Brands Hatch or maybe even Silverstone [are] about equal distance [as my local circuit],” he tells Motorsport News, “certainly not Castle Combe over near Bristol, but [I’ve got] many friends there now, that’s where the GT championship is. [It] feels like home for me.”
And Billinton started the prize race for a couple of reasons. “I’m wanting to give back to the sport and do a little promotion, help the circuit, bring new people into the sport, particularly young people. I think it’s vital because I see people retiring and not coming back.
“I see that as an important side to what I do because I had a lot of help at the start [of my racing], people doing things for free for me and giving their time and effort and motorsport can’t fully operate without that, particularly at grassroots level.
And it’s particularly important to Billinton that it’s Castle Combe. “I really want to support that and see them build the classes and the races like they used to have 10, 15 years ago and put it really on the map in terms of GT racing and other classes, and get the crowd numbers up to double where they are now. That would be really fantastic because it’s a great circuit,” he says.