In 1973 and 1974 the Eight Clubs had a couple of Race Meetings at Lydden Hill, but support wasn’t great so the idea was dropped. At one of these I had been telling Mike Roper how fast I thought he ought to go in his SP250 and, sure enough, it gave him the confidence to do whatever time I’d said (I had done that before at Lydden to someone else – it does boost the Handi­capper’s ego when it succeeds). What I didn’t know was how abrasive the track surface was, and therefore how little tread pattern remained on Mike’s tyres as a result. Not long after, he let a friend borrow the SP and the worn tyres failed to grip a wet bit of road resulting in a broadside-on collision with a tree. The driver recovered but the car did not – I later bought the remains of its body but that is another story for another day.

The 750 Motor Club’s six-hour relay race, like the Eight Clubs, was an invention of Holland Birkett after whom it is now named. A team of up to six cars runs one car at a time as it likes for six hours. The handicappers credit the teams with numbers of laps, based on their knowledge (or best guess) of what each team member might be capable of, the history of that sort of team and a number of other things including fuel tank capacity. One problem we had was that practice sessions for the relay race were not timed, not was there any order in which cars were required to appear. However older timekeepers never travelled without their watches and were prepared to try to time whatever we asked. One year at Thruxton we asked Roland King-Farlow, who had timed at Brooklands and the TT pre-war, to time any of a team of Bertorelli Alfa Romeos. One was to be driven by Leo Bertorelli and another by Roger Clark, at that time Britain’s top rally driver. As Clark emerged from the pits beneath the timekeepers’ box K-F spotted him, started his watches and a few minutes later was able to tell us that Clark’s standing lap had been his fastest by a couple of seconds, but he had caught Leo and slowed down to show him the racing lines. We took note, but in the race Clark destroyed the engine as a result of oil surge, a rally man not being used to looking at an oil pressure gauge when cornering hard.

The handicapper’s real problems are the previously unseen combination of driver and car. We seem to guess too fast (so they finish nowhere) or too slow (so they run away with the race) more often than we would like. As the day progresses we get a better understanding, so the results for anyone who raced more than once usually improved. At the Eight Clubs there was an inter-Club team race as the last race of the day and that was of course handicapped with all the day’s other results before us. Consequently we Handicappers used to get the result so nearly right that the Timekeepers had difficulty in timing the finish, something they found hard to forgive. Similarly at MGCC there were a couple of all-comers’ handicaps where the first dozen from each race had a run in a final which we had every chance of getting right. At the Eight Clubs one year it had all bunched up nicely for the final entry into Woodcote Corner when one David Bettinson in his “Mickey Mouse” special (a sort of Lotus 7 variant) dived down the inside from about 15^th place. Any slight misjudgement of his and his car’s ability to get round that corner on the inside line would have resulted in the biggest multiple pile-up ever seen, but he got it right to just win at the finish line.

I said we added Bentley DC to our business, and it may be of interest to tell you how it happened. I had been a spectator at BDC Silverstone for years until one year Tony Bird, Competitions Secretary of the VSCC at the time, asked me (as I was a Handi­capper) to stand in for him looking after the VSCC’s interests at BDC. I then discovered that their method was to ask all their participating clubs for competitors’ lap times and then use the results (uncritically) to calculate handicaps. I saw also that a Morgan +8 was given a start that was longer than his expected time for a standing lap and tried to intervene without suc­cess, so at the end of his first lap he duly passed the grid where cars were still waiting to start (fortunately without catas­trophe). I suggested to Gibbs Pancheri, the BDC’s Director, that an approved Handicapper would not have allowed this to happen, and perhaps I could do the job for them. He agreed, but the BDC being what it was I had to have dinner with their then Competitions Captain, Victor Gauntlett, at his Club in Piccadilly before he would approve of me.

We started at BDC in the mid 1970s when neither we nor the timekeepers were computerised. Timing was by hand-oper­ated split-action chronograph, each timekeeper timing four or five cars, and a separate person kept a lap chart of the run­ning list variety. The published result was created by the reading of the lap chart order with the times supplied by the appropriate timekeeper, the whole being written down by the Chief Timekeeper. At our first BDC event we got all the finishers of one race across the line in such short order that the lapchart broke down, and the Chief Timekeeper had to spend the next race reconstructing it from the timekeepers’ sheets before he could publish the result. We were told that they had never had a finish as close as that before – and for the next year they got a new (and younger) lap chart team. Later someone in the Bentley DC thought that credit laps made a race harder to follow, so we used the Silverstone pit lane for the Start, and let the time benefit be as long as in needed to be (over six minutes on some occasions). As that resulted in the limit cars covering a number of laps before the scratch men started, I could never see how it was easier to follow.

Being respectively a scientist (Royal Aircraft Establishment) and an engineer (de- Havilland/Hawker Siddeley Aviation/British Aerospace), Robin and I were well used to computers at work so we managed to com­puterise the handicapping as soon as affordable and portable home computers appeared. (actually Robin had sometimes used a programmable pocket calculator before that). We had always found that we made silly errors under pressure, so we believed that building the skill into the tool would remove those errors and it did. The card index was more work to com­puterise on the poor capacity apparatus we used in 1985 (Commodore 64s) but we did it, and the logic we developed then was used through several changes of machine up to the present. As I said, we lost the notes of progress in lap times, but we did gain the ability to have data for up to eight circuits for each competitor, and with that to mechanise the conversions between circuits. We had always had the idea that times put up at a different circuit should be useful extra data and our original rough and ready conversion factors were quite helpful: the computer can be asked to fit a likely-looking curve to the data points from a pair of circuits to give a better correlation.