The weird and wonderful of club motorsport this week

A very unusual Sports 2000 machine and some interesting cars in action at the Classic Sports Car Club's Thruxton meeting are among the weird and wonderful stories from last weekend's national motorsport events

Unusual car of the week: Sports 2000 Shrike

Is it a hovercraft? Is it a spaceship? No, it's Rob Hall's Shrike P15, which took a Sports 2000 victory at Silverstone last weekend. The category allows more freedom than most when it comes to car designs and the Shrike's unusual contours are the perfect example of that.

For this year, the organising Sports Racing Car Club is running separate races for its Duratec and Historic classes - and it was in the latter that Formula Ford 1600 ace Hall prevailed in the John Phipps owned car, which was restored in 2019.

A Chevrolet-engined BMW: Sam Allpass's M4

Photo by: Steve Jones

BMWs aren’t generally specified with rear-mounted six-litre Chevrolet V8 engines, but Sam Allpass’s unique M4 - built by Geoff Steel Racing on a French Solution F tubeframe chassis - is the exception.

Raced sparingly since it caught fire in testing for the Classic Sports Car Club’s 2020 Thruxton event, Allpass won the Slicks Series race at the Hampshire venue at the weekend following a perfectly-timed pit call and pursuer Chris Griffin spinning and rolling his Aston Martin GT4 at Village.

From a road car to the tracks: Clive Anderson's BMW E30

Photo by: Steve Jones

Clive Anderson’s fabulous Prism Racing BMW E30, powered by a 5.1-litre twin-turbo Rover V8 engine developing 525bhp, went better than ever at Thruxton. Anderson qualified on the front row for the Special Saloons & Modsports races and won the second with a new personal best 1m21.299s (104.32mph) lap.

Designed and built in-house by Anderson and his tremendously enthusiastic band of weekend and evening warriors, the monster has evolved from Clive’s wife Dee’s standard road car.

Remembering a national racing legend: Single-seaters at Snetterton

Photo by: Richard Styles

Some stunning Formula Ford action helped celebrate legendary racing school founder Jim Russell in style at the weekend. The Historic Sports Car Club commemorated Russell, who died in 2019, with its second Jim Russell Trophy event.

The meeting featured a range of single-seater contests - including six guest races from the Monoposto Racing Club. But some of the best action came in Historic FF1600 with Tom McArthur and Samuel Harrison (8) having two close scraps, which McArthur twice topped, claiming the opener by just 0.041 seconds.

Pics of the week