Goodbye Speed Championships, Hello Race Championships

At the start of 2020, the whole world was hit with a global pandemic which I think we’ll all agree no one saw coming or planned for. Due to this, the Porsche Club decided to cancel the Speed Championships, for the time being, leaving me one option, which was a HUGE step up.  

My only option if I wanted to continue with racing at the Porsche Club was to compete in the full Race Championships, this is where the cars competing are backed by race teams, they are primarily bought and prepared by main Porsche dealerships and Motorsport companies and are mainly driven by a chosen employee or an experienced race driver. This series of races includes qualifiers, grid starts with 30 to 40 drivers and the unpredictability that comes with this that you will recognise from the F1 races on TV.

When Porsche Club GB told me while on a day out at Brands Hatch Circuit that they were not running the Speed Championships I went straight over to see my trainer, Nick. I asked him if I was up to doing the full Championships.  I can still see the grimace on his face as he replied, ‘I really am not sure, you will need to do a lot of work in an incredibly short space of time and even then I’m not sure’. Luckily for me, Nick likes a challenge as much as I do and, in the end, said ‘OK, let’s do this but you are going to need to get a lot of seat time in and I’m going to throw everything at you’.

Nick lined up multiple trips to skid pans, specialist test centres and tracks all over the country (15 tracks in all). He would ask me to pull the car over every now and again to give me a 15-minute physics lesson, ask me how I was feeling and tell me what I was doing wrong. 

He pushed me to do so many things outside of a humans comfort zone until it started to become natural…either that or I was beginning to develop the crazy gene that most race drivers have. Whichever way we were getting faster and faster in a controlled manner.