Donington Park Sunday 29th September 2013

Another Sunday, another visit to Donington....This time for a Motor Sport Vision Racing organised meeting where the headline event was the finale of the BRDC Formula 4 championship. 12 races on the bill included 3 for the Mini Challenge, 2 each for Production BMW's, F3 Cup and Radical SR3 Challenge along with the aforementioned Formula 4 plus a 1 hour Lotus Cup UK race.
The BRDC F4 championship has been one of the season's highlights. Pitched against the newly winged Formula Ford at the start of the year for drivers wanting to start their climb on the single-seater ladder, the series can quite easily claim to have "won" the battle with grids hovering around the 20 mark for most of the year. 18 cars entered Donington as those drivers who'd got no say in the title race left for pastures new or ran out of money. To have 6 drivers in with a mathematical shout at winning the championship going into the final 3 races says much for the competitiveness of the series. Indeed there have been 12 different race winners in 24 races as well. Jake Hughes will be known for ever more as the first winner of the championship as he wrapped up the title by winning the Saturday race and Charlie Robertson leapt from 5th to 2nd in the standings by winning both Sunday races. I was impressed by the standard of driving when I saw F4 at Brands Hatch in May and both races I witnessed on Sunday were both good, although there were a few slightly dodgy defending moves coming into the Old Hairpin on occasion! Hopefully the series will remain popular and it will be interesting to see how many cars are on the grid for their winter series which takes place at Snetterton and Brands Hatch in November. There is a slight cloud on the horizon though with the possible introduction in 2015 of a rival FIA Formula 4 which may be a renamed Formula Ford. Only in Motor Sport can such confusion be created!
This meeting was on the GP circuit which I'm not a great fan of for club racing so this meeting wasn't one of the better ones I've seen this year, especially after the previous 2 meetings at Donington had been really good. Poor F3 Cup and Radical SR3 races were balanced out by better Production BMW and Mini Challenge affairs. The 3 Mini races saw each one get gradually more frenetic as the day wore on and the final race of the day saw the appearance of the Safety car and a big crash for Lee Allen at Redgate which happened a few feet away from me and woke me up a bit....Alarmingly the gravel trap didn't slow the car at all as the Mini hit the barrier backwards but the driver walked away OK.
BMW are represented by 3 different series in UK club racing with Production E30 and Compact versions catered for along with the BARC Kumho series all having enormous grids in 2013.
The final race of the day was for the Lotus Cup UK whose hour long race didn't get off to the best of starts with Tom Chatterway's Lotus 2 Eleven being turned into the wall down the start/finish straight just after the rolling start. After 10 minutes behind the safety car, racing resumed and ended with the sun setting on another long day at Donington with the race finishing at 6.40pm......

Admission was £10 with the usual £5 DPRAC discount and a contender for Programme of the year was £3. Special mention to this as MSVR produced a 75 page A4 size programme with lots of readable material in it with the F4 showdown being given lots of coverage.