CLUB INSIGHT Classic Sports Car Club
The CSCC prides itself on stellar driving standards and catch-all series, which is why its popularity continues to boom
An in-depth look at the reasons behind the club’s popularity
The Classic Sports Car Club set the gold standard within the national racing scene last year, achieving the highest average grid sizes of any organiser. In a packed market in which some championships could only muster three cars per race, for the CSCC to top 40 entries in its
Tin Tops and Magnificent Sevens series on occasion is not to be sniffed at.
That aptly rounded out the previous decade, which will be remembered as a boom period for national motorsport.
The monetary values of race cars soared and clubs hit record levels of interest – the CSCC posted an all-time high of
408 entries at Silverstone in 2018.
Modern history is cyclical, however. For every period of economic prosperity, there must be a time of austerity. Peacetime in international relations is followed by wartime. Similarly for club-level racing in the UK, and now particularly in the face of Brexit and the climate crisis, we’re odds-on for a slump in the 2020s. To pre-empt this, the CSCC has evolved away from the roots of its name. It’s not an exclusive home for cars of the 20th century, one that turns its nose up at period-incorrect stickers and nonmatching chassis numbers. It’s worked hard to become a broad church so that, when a decline hits the club scene, it’s well sorted to keep its head above water.
The CSCC was created in 2001 in a partnership between Richard Wos and Richard Culverhouse. The latter had fallen out with the Aston Martin Owners Club, while Wos was part of a group running the now-defunct Anglo-american series.
“The Swinging Sixties – our first series – started as a result of that,” says Wos. “That was our first foray into club motorsport. I was coordinator for the Anglo-american series and at the same time the TR Register [for Triumphs] was having a little bit of difficulty with its members and the guy running it had had enough.”
Previously the TR5S and TR6S had been on a fairly even keel, making for sound competition. But as more TR7S entered club racing and benefited from the power of the venerable aluminium Rover V8, they began to dominate. As a result, Wos sought to separate the two.
“That caused lot of internal strife and politics,” recalls Wos. “I said, ‘Look, if we take you guys over, we’ll put the TR7S in our Future Classics series [for sports, saloons and GT cars from the 1970s and 1980s] and keep the TR6S in Swinging Sixties. That was loved by everyone, so they all came over and that’s why it was so successful from day one. Now we’ve built up all the other series, but that was the bedrock of the club. Now I’d imagine it’d be extremely difficult to start afresh.”
With the aim of the club to support
and grow grass-roots racing, in 2002 the CSCC was recognised by the Motor Sports Association (now Motorsport UK). Since an inaugural meeting at Snetterton in August 2003, much of the blueprint has remained the same: non-championship, 40-minute races that feature a pitstop for one or two-driver teams.
That marked the CSCC out as something different compared to what else was on offer at the turn of the millennium. As
Wos adds: “We were more or less the first people on the scene to run series and 40minute races. A lot of commentators didn’t like series, because everybody was used to championships and running for 15 minutes. But when I used to race and go to the Nurburgring, you’d always have a long race. We’d come back here and think, ‘What’s going on?’ A 15-minute race is a waste of time.”
From his time competing with a Reliant Sabre Six, Wos could carry those lessons over with his own club. In the early days, the CSCC meetings also catered for the Jaguar Enthusiasts’ Club, among others. They were welcome to stick to their sprint races, but the CSCC’S homemade series would be a longer affair.
For the spectator, they can be a mixed bag. The pitstops mean that a particular dice between two cars can fizzle out at the halfway stage when drivers take their 30-second success penalty for having won earlier that season. Similarly, the second driver could hop in and be well off the pace. Alternatively, a subdued first 20 minutes can benefit from the half-time shuffle to reach a thrilling climax. But, the truth is, club racing has a limited draw when it comes to packing out the banks at
Castle Combe or wherever, so appealing to drivers is the first priority.
An almost inevitable consequence of the well-liked format, however, has been the subsequent copycats – imitation is the best form of flattery, after all. In the words of CSCC director David Smitheram, “there’s no question that there are significantly more 40 and 45-minute pitstops races out there at club level compared to when we started”.
When standing still is as good as going backwards, the club has had to become a class leader in other areas to ensure the retention of its competitors.
One such route taken by the CSCC is to impose the highest driving standards.
The club has become renowned for its clean racing. Part of that is a natural by-product of the format. It makes little sense to lunge for a first-corner do-or-die overtake if you’ve paid for a further 39 minutes of racing and when there are no championship points on offer.
“When it’s a series, the clock resets after each meeting, it’s just one race,” adds Smitheram. “You shake hands and if you’ve had an unlucky race then there’s no hard feelings and it hasn’t ruined your whole season. Off you go again.”
Collisions remain an inevitable consequence of racing, of course, so again the CSCC has worked hard in this area to ensure consistency. Punishments must be hard, with the need to eliminate the risk of any repeat offenders and in a bid to appease the innocent party.
“The way we deal with drivers is a twostep process,” says Smitheram. “First and foremost is the clerks. We’re fortunate that, although they retain their independence, we generally have the same team for each meeting. They’re consistent and they understand what we’re trying to do. It’s fun, we have customers, and so there’s no ‘rubbing is racing’. It’s supposed to be clean.
“The club itself has its own set of driving standards. We retain a black book, which we’ve had for well over 10 years. It allows us to record incidents and track behaviour and deal with it privately. We then take action according to our sliding scale of club disciplinary steps. Much is owed to our
“We’d come back from racing at the Nurburgring and think, ‘What’s going on?’ A sprint race is a waste”
volunteers and committee members who give up so much of their time for the drivers.”
The pay-off is when these measures are noticed by drivers. Tim Davis splits his time between racing his prized TVR Tuscan Challenge car in the New Millennium series for post-2000 machines and an ultra-fast Caterham
C400 in the Magnificent Sevens. Those are two specialist bits of kit, so he can do without regular trips to the bodyshop.
“I started racing in 2008 – me and my mate bought a couple of [TVR] Tasmins and raced in the Dunlop Challenge,” explains Davis. “There weren’t many rules, which allowed people to bend them. That’s why I love the structure of the CSCC. It’s firm but fair. The quality of the driving is good and if it’s not they sort it out if you do make a complaint.
“The competition is fantastic. I race a Caterham now and there’s 10 people going for the lead. It’s absolutely epic. But there’s also really good standards. Because of the speed of the cars and the agility, you worry a little bit. But it’s not like the Caterham Academy and all the other official racing series, where if you don’t come back with all your wings missing then you haven’t really tried hard enough. We’re not into that, with carbonfibre wings at £500 a throw. Over the last two years, I’ve still got the same mudguards on.”
Having established solid foundations around clean, long-form racing, the
CSCC has had an opportunity to be more adventurous. A trope of the club’s calendar is the inclusion of overseas rounds. An annual trip to Spa has become something of a mainstay, so each year the CSCC tries to add a more ambitious location.
Over its near two-decade history, the club has twice raced on the banking at Daytona. There’s been action on the Nurburgring Nordschleife, trips to Dijon, Magny-cours and more. For 2020, it will make its debut on the Le Mans Bugatti layout in what’s thought to be a first for a whole UK club, rather than just a travelling single series. It’s something that Smitheram has been working on for three years, and reckons ideas for the calendar are sketched out through until 2024.
“We’ve recognised over the years that getting the balance between stability and offering something new every year is important,” says Smitheram. “Like with any kind of business, it’s significantly easier if you can look after your existing drivers rather than trying to find brandnew ones. If you only ever offer the same tracks, apart from the camaraderie in the paddock and the eligibility of your car, why would you want to keep coming back for the next five years if nothing ever changes?
“Every year the CSCC committee discusses what we’re keeping the same, what’s brand new, and something that we haven’t done for a few years. That’s the format we tend to run – a night race every few years, perhaps a TV race, and we rotate visits to Anglesey, Mallory Park, Castle Combe and so on.”
Taking a couple of hundred competitors abroad requires a large financial outlay, and so these meetings are closer to breaking even rather than operating as some sort of cash cow. That’s a sacrifice that should pay off, however, and in turn ensure that names keep signing up for the experience both at home and away.
One of the biggest differences since that first meeting in 2003 is the number of series the CSCC now runs in-house. Over the years it has operated races for various clubs and championships, but more and more it’s moved to have full autonomy. This season it will launch its 11th creation – the Slick Series, for all saloon, hatchback, sports and GT cars with doors that race on slick tyres or racing wets.
Starting a new series cannot be done on a whim. It’s not a case of sticking your
“It’s significantly easier if you can look after your existing drivers rather than finding new ones”
finger in the air and feeling which way the wind is blowing. That’s not sustainable in the long term, and is why there’s no set formula for how the CSCC decides what’s coming next.
As Smitheram says: “We come up with something new for a whole host of different reasons. Most of it in recent years has come from us in the office or from Richard Wos. He’s good for ideas, he chucks grenades at us and he’s got his finger on the pulse and what’s going on more on the classic side. It’s a combination of awareness of the marketplace and always looking for a niche. Each of the recent series that we’ve done – Turbo Tin Tops, Slicks or the RX-8 Trophy – they’ve all come about a slightly different way.”
In the case of the Slick Series, that has partly come off the back of interest from the club’s pre-existing racers. As Davis will attest, his TVR Challenge car is a bona-fide racing machine, not a modified road car. To maximise its capabilities necessarily entails full racing rubber. What’s more, he expects the first year – comprising four races ahead of an expanded calendar in 2021 – to be a hit.
“I think that’s an epic one to do,” Davis says. “Everyone’s sort of asking, ‘Why can’t you use slicks or race wets?’ The CSCC always listens, that’s the good thing. You can chat to them on a level and say, ‘We think this’ and they put it to a vote. They’ve listened to the members.
“I’ve invited all my TVR mates to come and race. I think all the Sagaris boys that aren’t really allowed anywhere else are going to come and race on slicks. I think that’s going to be probably the biggest one they’ve got. The beauty of this is there’s something for everybody and that underlies the CSCC.”
And here’s the thing. You wouldn’t bet against the Slick Series from succeeding, and a large part of that comes from the way Smitheram, fellow director Hugo Holder and race administrator Hannah Gardin understand the scene.
They’ve all done their fair share of racing with other clubs. That gives them a first-hand perspective that feeds back in to an understanding of what the
CSCC competitors desire.
“It’s a corny phrase, but they’ve got petrol running in their veins,” says
Wos. “They’re serious enthusiasts and they draw strength from each other.
This is a fantastic team. Hugo [chairman of the Association for British Motor Racing Clubs] has got that knowledge and experience. David is great on the modern end. It’s a really balanced team. “Other clubs try to make money out of the system, but we’re not like that.
We’re there to give the drivers a good experience, a new experience at different tracks. It’s what we do. If we have a good meeting then it subsidises the next one.
It’s for the benefit of the members.”
What this shows is that it’s wrong to read too much into a name. In its attitude and its expanding portfolio of series, the CSCC drifts further away from its ‘Classic’ roots. The way in which it looks after its marshals by offering evening activities and financial incentives to offset the trend of ailing numbers, the way it’s making grids sustainable and by looking after existing competitors, this is a club well set to take on the looming challenges of the forthcoming decade. It’s not rested on the merits of its recent success, and has instead worked to be flexible and pragmatic.
There’s something else, too, that comes from none of the CSCC’S grids being purely one-make. Those watching on can see a Maserati Gran Turismo MC GT4 car take to the track alongside a Volkswagen Beetle RSI. The mad-dog creations that find a home in the Special Saloons and Modsports series range from the ex-gerry Marshall Baby Bertha to Ian Hall’s Darrian Wildcat T98 GTR. Or there’s the club’s kingpin: the Lotus Elans and Austin-healeys of the Swinging Sixties. That epitomises the incredibly rich and diverse nature of national racing in this country – its strongest asset.
“We’re not trying to make money. We’re there to give the drivers a good and new experience”