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Silverstone The Holly Birkett Six Hour Relay 28th October 2006

Event Report by John Roberts

51 Teams of cars of differing performance to battle it out for the honours. Really it’s just good fun!!

The 57th ‘Holly’ Birkett Handicap Relay race is a unique event in the world of motor racing and was originally conceived to give cars of differing performance the opportunity of competing on ‘equal’ terms in a long-distance race; the concept obviously worked and it has proved to be one of the most popular events in the UK.

The event is held each year on the Silverstone National Circuit with 51 teams of usually six cars in each team. This makes for a very lively six hours indeed.

There were three Classic Jaguar Teams this year: The Jaguar Ensemble, Ecurie XK and the XK Jaguars. Yours truly joined in with The Jaguar Ensemble which comprised six cars with the other five cars being two XKs and three E-Types. The E-Types were very early versions from 1961, one of which had ex-Works WK plates on.

We were not going there to win, with our age, speed handicaps and having six cars in the team, but just to have a weekend of fun and that we did.

Luckily scrutineering took place on the Friday. It was just as well with nearly 300 cars in attendance, it was really manic.

Luckily, the weather stayed dry and there were no major incidents other than engines blowing up and the odd ‘OFF’ into the ‘Kitty Litter’.

I mentioned the differing performance of the teams. Well, the list of cars ranged from Caterham, Cobra, Chevron, TVR, Porsche, Mallock single-seaters, Mustang and even Citroen 2CV6s. So this was an exercise of fitting and using all three rear-facing mirrors to check whether a single-seat lightweight was coming in under your radar. If dementia was on the cards for some of us ‘Oldies’ it certainly got delayed by a full day last Saturday.

We had our fair share of consistency during the first four hours, where we were up to about 21st, but gradually faded with reliability problems, such as overheating brakes, and I did the last stint of the day but my throttle cable snapped and the engine started to scream, so we had to get Robin Batt out in his beautiful E-Type for the last ten minutes.

However, as I said this was a really fun event and very much a team event, where everyone joined in to help others out. The girls were there with hot food. The Chicken Curry prepared by Rosemary Groom really made some of the chaps go faster, even on the way home.

So, fun was had by all, and we were ably assisted by our Team Boss Barry Burgess from CKL Developments and Bert Stellinga from Vredestein in the Netherlands who volunteered (so they say) to captain the Ecurie XK Team.

That’s it for this race season. As a point of interest, I came 4th in Class in the XK Championship and that was with 3 DNFs (Did Not Finishes) this year, whilst I am getting much better reliability from the car.

Next year the race season starts in April, but the full calendar should be available in January we hope. At which point we will publish it.

In the meantime, have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and season`s best wishes to you and your family.

Signing off!

John

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