After retiring from full-time work last year, I marked my return to racing with a class win in the CALM All Porsche Trophy at Donington on Easter Bank Holiday Monday, sharing the car with professional race coach David Hornsey. The opening round of the season, in challenging damp conditions, saw a capacity grid of 38 cars, including almost every model from air-cooled 911s to PDK Caymans. Driving the same Moluto Motorsport 924 as I’d done since June 2017 and now starting my 11th season, I’d spent two seasons away from racing after family bereavements.

In order to get used to the car – and to racing – again, I’d opted to pay extra to join the 20 minutes “free practice” session, which was the first use of the circuit that day. The track was damp but a distinctive racing line was appearing. Only wanting to bed myself back in, I nevertheless finished 30th fastest out of the 45 cars who took part.

We’d had more rain by the start of the qualifying session and the track was much more slippery. We decided that I’d start both qualifying and the race as first driver and that there wasn’t much point in me doing more than the mandatory 3 laps before letting David set our qualifying time – which he certainly did,  putting us 28th out of a 38 car grid (which is the limit for Donington national), ahead of a 944, a 968, two Caymans and four Boxsters – and most importantly several places ahead of our only real competition, the only other car in our 924 class, that of Hugh Peart.

The race was to be a rolling start and conditions had gotten worse still. The start was delayed by about 20 minutes while we waited for a crashed car from the previous race to be recovered. I knew it was crucial to keep up with the cars in front, which I did, and then for 20 minutes drive as fast as I could without taking risks because I know Hugh wouldn’t be far behind.

By the time the pitstop window had opened, I could barely see out so I was relieved when the “Pit Window” sign – which I could only just see – was shown. I came into the pits on the following lap and let David take over. Although our pitstop was over the allotted time, David re-joined the race still ahead of Hugh, so it was really  up to him how much he wanted to push the car to increase the gap. 

So a relatively easy class win for us. We are not scheduled to race again until August when we have two races on Silverstone’s International circuit.

Full in-car video from the race – recorded on my new wired-remote.com camera. Click through to YouTube to view at full HD quality.