How a racing novice crept up to speed in a Beetle-engined stalwart

The spring winds enveloping Donington Park matched my nervous chill as I greeted the team ahead of a big day. Three years after hanging up my karting helmet, I made the bold move to return to racing in the Formula Vee championship with the 750 Motor Club for the season opener on Easter Monday. 

Following advice from 2019 champion Graham Gant, I joined Alan Harding’s AHS Motorsport outfit for the season, one of the series’ staple squads. While it’s possible to pick up a decent car for the moderate sum of £8000, these Beetle-engined machines have more engineering nuances than meets the eye. Therefore, in the interests of reliability and set-up help, I settled on a rent-a-car deal of a GAC for a teeth-grinding £1000 per day. 

While to most this will be a big sum of dough, Formula Vee – approaching its 60th birthday next year – remains one of the cheapest open-wheel categories you can get involved with. And it is therefore no wonder it continues to attract drivers both young and old.

“It’s nowhere near as expensive as anything else,” explains Harding, whose AHS team has been around since the late 1990s, constructing and running Formula Vee machines.

“If you really want to, within a few years you can be proficient enough to run your own car. Don’t discuss what you’re going to do, get on and do it. Make the mistakes. Fall over. Get out on track and find out you can’t drive it at all because that’s the only way you’ll push forward.

“Most of the young guys are coming in from karts and they’ve spent all the available budget on karting. There’s nothing left and they need to get out of karts because they are 16 or 17, but there’s no budget, so what can you do with their 20 grand? You couldn’t get in a Formula Ford or drive an F1000. You can’t do a full season in those, but in Formula Vee you can.” 

Hamera faced a few pre-race nerves as he got back behind the wheel after three years

Photo by: Steve Jones

Inexpensive it may be, but it was still stressful – and the morning drivers' briefing did little to calm the nerves. After all, a short test day was all the knowledge I possessed of both my car and the track, coming into an event featuring 27 entries. That unease was proven justified as a scrappy qualifying session left me only 18th on the grid, a far cry from the top 10 the team expected.

Determined to climb up the field, I did my best Max Verstappen impression as I weaved aggressively on the formation lap to get some heat into the Hoosier crossply tyres. Lining up in my grid slot, it dawned on me that I had never actually done a racing standing start before in any car, let alone the Formula Vee.

It was rather fortuitous that I asked Harding how many revs I should hold before getting in the car, but he warned that the change into second was a quick one, which I vowed to take on board.

“Mechanical sympathy is one of the hardest things to incorporate into your racing, as everyone just wants to go flat out all the time” Dan Polley

As the five-second board came out, I set the revs accordingly and kept muttering to myself about the change into second gear. This would be my downfall as the lights went out and I released the clutch, I immediately changed up too early on the four-speed manual box. The car bogged down due to the stress-induced haste and, while I picked up speed eventually, I dropped to near last on the run into Redgate.

Luckily, I managed to get my eye in early on and started passing cars. After a frenetic race that featured several laps of opposite lock through the Craner Curves, I managed to claw my way up to ninth as the flag fell.

Speaking with winner Dan Polley after that character-building first race revealed the secret to being successful in the series. “With the UK Vee, it’s all about mechanical sympathy,” says the Irishman. “They are tuned to within an inch of their lives, so that’s why you have a much higher failure rate in the UK Vees compared to the Irish Vees. Mechanical sympathy is one of the hardest things to incorporate into your racing, as everyone just wants to go flat out all the time.”

Double Donington winner Polley says there’s a difference between UK and Irish Vee series

Photo by: Steve Jones

Soon it was time to do it all again for race two, this time from my hard-fought ninth place on the grid, from which I had a clear view of poleman Polley. All the revs rose, louder than the race before – mainly because I had forgotten my earplugs, but my elevated anxiety had an effect too.

My eyes were wide open as I stared at the gantry when the red lights suddenly illuminated. Then the lights flashed off, and all I got was a bootful of revs! I quickly deduced that the lack of motion was due to me still being in neutral.

After a brief scare that I might be collected by the charging horde, I became apoplectic. Considering I had made a mess of the first start, I was livid with myself for finding a method for achieving one that was even worse. Since the field was so far in front, I thought to hell with mechanical sympathy and mashed the car into gear to begin a fury-filled chase of the leading drivers.

Catching the back of the pack on lap one, I made quick work of them to continue slicing my way up the field. While it would be hyperbole to say I didn’t need my mirrors, the fact remained that I was exceedingly uninterested in what was happening behind. Eventually, I managed to slug my way up to eighth and was right on the gearbox of seventh-placed Phil Waterhouse when the safety car was deployed and stayed out to the chequered flag.

As I lifted myself out of the car in the garage, I mused over my shoddy start and reflected on the weekend. The key takeaway was how different these cars are to anything I’ve experienced, read about, or been told in motorsport. They do not reward smoothness; the technique is smashing the loud pedal the moment you come off the brakes and powering through the corner, relying on little more than buckets of valour and delusional amounts of hope. 

Harding kept repeating over the course of the day that to drive a Formula Vee fast, the car must be out of control everywhere, and now I understand what he meant. Frankly, any techniques you’ve learned driving other race cars, you might as well put in the bin.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the July 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

Poor starts left Hamera battling through the pack to a pair of top-10 results

Photo by: Steve Jones