Donington Park Sunday 22nd September 2013

After a brief taste of Winter weather at Donington the previous week it was back to glorious blue skies for the visit of the 750MC this weekend. The 750MC fixture in June was on the GP circuit so it was back to the (better for club racing) National circuit layout for this 2 day meeting. I went on the Sunday only so missed out on 750 Trophy (shame...)Monoposto's and Roadsports, but other than that all of the clubs many championships were in action on the Sunday with 14 races in total.
Qualifying for the BMW Compact Cup started bright and early at 9.05am but David Drinkwater in the No.67 car probably wished he hadn't bothered making the long journey from Farnborough. He trundled slowly down through the Craner Curves and parked up near the old Spark Plug commentary point without completing a full lap. His mood cannot have been good but a few minutes later it would have dipped slightly more as another BMW Compact got on the grass on the exit of the Old Hairpin and headed straight towards his parked car....The end result was 2 compact Compact's and if there is a moral to the tale it would be drivers have to be very careful when parking up with technical problems. I've seen it so many times where a driver picks the worst part of the circuit to pull the car over and further incident happens. I'd have like to have told you who the other driver was. but when car numbers are placed only in rear windscreens and said windscreens are smashed into thousands of tiny pieces, it's difficult to tell!
Following that early excitement, 3 more qualifying sessions took place and then it was into racing. A slightly strange day this when the usual series that provide the thrills and good racing were put in the shade by other championships. It's not usual for a 750 meeting to have the Bike-Sports championship provide the best racing of the day but the pair of races for this championship were excellent. What made them good was the presence of a couple of rapid young Swedish drivers, Oskar Kruger and Jesper Westerholm in Radical PR6's racing hard along with Lewis Plato's SR3 and Jon-Paul Ivey's PR6. Kruger won the first race after some frantic racing as Westerholm went off at McLeans. Then Westerholm bagged the second race with some stunning moves pulled into the Old Hairpin, which isn't something you see very often.
Other races of note were the Stock Hatches, both modern and classic, which were their usual frenetic affairs. It's good to see the clubs initiative of providing a home for the old shape Renault Clio starting to bear fruit as 6 cars were at the back of the modern Stock Hatch grid. That's 5 more than were in evidence at Mallory Park on Easter Monday. The Compact Cup provided some good racing with a very large grid of cars on show albeit with 2 less from the morning's activities....
The days only downside was that out of 14 races, there were 6 red flags during the day but the show was kept on the road and the final race of the day for 750 Formula finished (despite being stopped and restarted) just after 6.30. It was good to see a few more in attendance this week after the poor weather the previous week as better weather helped, plus the 750MC have a justifiable reputation for providing really good club racing.
Admission was £10 with the usual £5 DPRAC discount and programme was £2

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