..and a touch of Mrs Balls

Potters. Generally a fairly benign bunch of folk. I mean, how often have you read a headline like "Potter injures friend with clay vase during argument" or "Potter cremates cheating lover in home furnace". You just don't. Potters create art from what is essentially sticky mud. A noble, peace loving and calm pursuit to be sure.

So why, I ask with tears in my eyes, did they decide to call the first bend on the East London Grand Prix circuit "Potters Bend". There is nothing calm or vaguely peace loving about Potters. Ok, I do get that it coincides with the exit of Potters Pass where it joins the circuit, but surely something descriptive of its fear inducing characteristics would have been more fitting, but more about that later.

East London Grand Prix circuit has some serious history too. Opened in 1959 in its current guise, it is a 3.9km collection of sweeping bends, fast straights and tight corners. It is reputed to have the longest straight of any circuit in the country. It hosted international Grand Prix events from 1960 to 1966 and has had most of the worlds greatest drivers of old lay down rubber in anger. 

Driving the EL GP circuit is to know that you have followed the same lines taken by legends such as Jim Clark, Jack Brabham, Graham Hill and the great Sir Stirling Moss. That's definitely worth an entry on the bucket list.

But, back to the circuit. It has eight corners, effectively four straights and a tight complex of bends breaking up the back stretch. Then it has Potters, oh, and Rifle. Now Rifle, there's a more fitting name.

So what's the big deal? Well, its simple really, and has all to do with the size of your dangly bits. You see, it is possible, with a well sorted car, to take both Potters and Rifle at full chat. Yep, that's with your right foot flat. In a average race car this means taking Potters at around 200km/h and Rifle at quite a bit more.

You need to have big dangly bits. Very big in actual fact. Preferably made of brass. They even have spotters that sit aside the track and check for brake lights and engine note changes. If you are deemed to have taken Potters "flat" you get to stick a bumper sticker on your car that simply announces "I have the balls for Potters". 

Sadly I don't.

I tried. I could blame the fact that it was my first time, and the car was new to me, and it was not my car, and, and, etc.

But, after having to spend some time convincing my butt cheeks to let go of the seat once I was back in the pits, I decided that it was my first time, in a new car that was not mine and I'm sure I would do Potters "flat" in my own car.

Right.

No, but really, the EL GP circuit is a fantastic circuit to drive. It is fast and flowing and the back section of the Esses and Cox's Corner is just sublime. You can flick the car from apex to apex and blast down to the The Sweep where you can slide the car wide and up to the last corner before doing it all again.

But, lets roll back a bit here and fill in the blanks.

Last weekend I was in the exceptionally fortunate position to be invited down to East London by my incredibly generous brother-in-law to drive one of his cars in the local EL regional club race day. The car in question was a rather tasty E30 BMW fitted with an even tastier 2.8l straight six engine.

This was going to be quite an experience since I had never raced a car with a roof for a start, let alone done so on the East London track. I was seriously looking forward to it though.

We arrived, uncharacteristically early for the chosen low cost airline, to a bright and warm Friday afternoon. Bruce collected me from the airport and we headed straight to the "track". I put that in quotes since the East London track is an open public road during the week. It is only closed off to other traffic when a race meeting is being held. 

This has both an upside and a down side. The upside is that we could go and drive around the track checking out lines without any prior arrangement. The downside is, of course, that the local folk have no facility to practice like we do in Cape Town, not that this "issue" seems to slow any of them down at all! As I was to discover a bit later.

After we had driven the track a few times we set off to go and view my weapon for the weekend.

I have always rather liked the little E30 ever since I had one back in the mid 90's. This one was really a shade of it's former luxury self. It had started life as a 325i Coupe and only the bodyshell and some of the dash remained. The engine is a 325 block fitted with 328 crank and pistons and boasts a triplet of side draft Webers. The gearbox is a BMW Getrag featuring the dog leg first gear some BMW's came out with back in the day. The suspension is all custom and the diff is a trick semi locked device that made manoeuvring around the pits quite a challenge.

Toot, toot, steam train coming through!

The car had been campaigned in Class A to good effect by Gary Marais in the 90's and had only recently been brought back to life after Bruce had seen it lounging in the back of Gary's workshop and bought it off him.

I climbed into the drivers seat to check for fit and was vaguely aware of a whiff of history that permeated the interior. There was nothing pretty about this car, it was all business inside. No sound deadening, no comfort. Just a race seat, scarred old stock steering wheel and gear knob of turned aluminium. The dash consisted of a rev counter and temp gauge with a mechanical oil pressure gauge bolted to the side almost as an afterthought. This was all about going fast with nothing extraneous to distract the driver.

Of course we fired it up. It coughed and backfired through the carbs and settled down to a lumpy idle only a race engine with a wild cam can pull off. This combination seemed to be the mating call of a thousand and one butterflies that suddenly started to breed in my stomach.    

It was all rather real now.

We made plans for the following morning and bid farewell to Gary. I had a slightly restless nights sleep for some obscure reason.

Saturday morning started off fairly slowly since racing only officially got underway at 1pm. Plans had, however, been made for some unofficial practice session during the morning as a bunch of Port Elizabeth folks were also coming up to race. We arrived at the track around 9am and offloaded the cars. Bruce had brought his Lotus 7 along as well. As a matter of fact a field of 36 cars had been entered for the day. An impressive field, no doubt spurred on by the recently convened Metro Challenge series being fought between PE and EL.

Home for the day

The track was opened to practice around 10:30am and Gary offered to go out ahead of me in Bruce's Lotus to show me the lines. I gladly accepted, so we belted up and headed out onto the track. Gary promptly disappeared into the distance, apparently doing a "slow lap". I lumbered around the track trying to get to grips with the severe sensory overload that is a tin top historic race car. After what seemed like half a lap Gary appeared behind me, passed me and slowed down so that I could try to follow him again. It worked a little better this time and I got the feel for some of the lines. I then decided to get stuck in and promptly spun the car coming out of Beacon Bend onto the main straight...where all the people were. Oh well, at least I could go back home afterwards. I felt for Gary as most people probably thought it was him driving. 

Back in the pits the lap timer showed some rather pedestrian 1:50 lap times, but I was secretly quite happy with that. Gary did inform me that the car would do 1:36's so I should be able to go a bit faster. 

I promised to try. Bruce even offered to beat me in his Lotus as an incentive, which I thought was nice of him. 

The BMW is a very different experience compared to my mid engined, V8 powered Harper. My Harper has buckets of torque that start from just above idle whereas the BMW needed a bit of a poke to get things going. However, once above 4000rpm the engine comes on song and pulls like a train to the 7000rpm red line. Handling is very neutral and not the tail happy experience I was expecting. When pushed hard the car has a hint of understeer, however, jumping on the power too early coming out of corners is severely punished as I had already discovered.

The second practice session yielded a couple of 1:46's after Gary gave me some gear change advice for the Esses complex. I was starting to get the hang of the car, if not the track yet.

Then it was qualifying. I can tell you for free that driving around the track virtually alone and trying to qualify amid 35 other cars of various speeds are two vastly different things. It was all tail lights, head lights and the smell of burnt rubber for a chaotic ten minutes. In the end it was rather pointless, or maybe fortuitous, as my transponder's batteries were flat and I did not register a time. Thankfully Bruce convinced the powers that be to allow me to use my practice times as a placing. This put me somewhere near the middle of the grid which actually suited me fine. 

Since there were only bikes and cars running on the day and all the cars ran in the same race, events happened pretty smartly once things got going. A scant 15 minutes after our qualifying we were up for the first heat. We circled around and stopped on the grid where we were placed in the correct slots. We then did a single lap with a rolling start. The lights went out and a couple of Escorts darted past on either side of me. This irked me somewhat and I felt a rare surge of brand allegiance as I set off in hot pursuit of the two Fords. I passed the first one just after Potters and was hard on the tail of the second when I glanced at the rear view mirror. I was greeted by the most amazing sight. A large V8 Chevvy was heading into Cocobana Corner sideways, plumes of tyre smoke all around, sweeping all before it away.  It was time to hustle. 

I bolted around the corner and then, what appeared to be disaster, struck. Coming out of the corner I snatched fourth and dropped the clutch to be greeted by lots of noise and no forward urge. The clutch was slipping. Badly. It has been doing a bit of slipping during the practice sessions, but nothing like this. The Escort shot past again as I backed off and dropped to third. That seemed to hold, but I feared my race was over. I slipped into the pit lane and limped towards a quizzical Gary. "The clutch has gone" I yelled over the noise. "You want me to carry on?" mindful that each driver that finished the race scored team points in the Metro Challenge. "Go, go" He yelled back. "It's just oil on the clutch plate, it will get better". As he had recently rebuilt the engine I figured he was probably right, besides I had nothing to lose, so I  blasted out the pit lane to join the race again. Of course I was now stone last. As I came around Rifle I spun the engine up and slipped the clutch until I could smell burnt clutch plate. "That should do it" I thought and off I went. Turned out it did do it. As long as I timed the application of power carefully it was ok. There was just a hint of slippage going into fifth on the main straight so it was chase time!

The rest of the race was a bit of a blur as cars and corners came in rapid succession. Somewhere around the middle of the race we started being lapped by the modified class which always adds to the excitement. I did managed to overtake a couple of cars, but due to a timing glitch I have no real idea where I came. All this actually made no difference in the end since it was by far the most fun I had had in a race car for some time. And I had managed a high 1:43 lap which was nice.

A noisy neighbour. Genuine Backdraft racing Cobra.

Now, back in Cape Town we usually have to wait a good couple of hours before the next heat. Not so in East London. The bikes were up next and scarcely 20 minutes later we were lined up on the grid again for our second heat. I was placed third last on the grid, which might have alluded to my position in the previous heat, but allowed me the joy and associated ego boost of overtaking cars for most of the race. I even managed to catch and overtake Bruce. Something that took much longer than I anticipated, given the extra grunt of the car I was driving. He's getting rather quick. Again I have no idea where I came, but I had even more fun than in the previous race.

It was just Potters that was taunting me. I was still lifting off going into Potters, but getting on the power earlier and earlier, however, some stubborn element of self preservation was consistently taking control of my accelerator foot. I almost managed to keep it flat on the second last lap of the race, but at the crucial moment my foot out-wrestled my brain and lifted itself off the pedal.

There was one more race for the day. The so called "All Comers". This is a race where no points are scored and gives other folks a chance to drive the cars. Bruce graciously offered his Lotus to Gary and I got nervous. This was my old car, I really should not be beaten by a 1600cc Lotus 7 when I'm driving a 2.8 litre, straight six powered class A legend. Ah well, all in good fun. The All Comers grid was decided on a first come basis which rather bizarrely put me on the second row. Twelve more cars lined up behind us as we set off on the formation lap. A small misunderstanding regarding the start procedure meant we did a second formation lap. We arrived back at the main straight tightly bunched. The lights went out and all hell broke loose. I floored the accelerator and dived for the left of the track, the racing line for Potters. Two cars lined up next to me and we entered Potters three abreast and awfully close together. Eventually I chickened out and let the others go. The race proceeded in a similar frenetic vein all around the track with me duking it out against my two friendly Escorts. Suddenly a Golf Mk1 joined the fray and as I was eyeing him I noticed the front of Lotus 7 ducking and diving behind him. On the main straight I got myself boxed in between an Escort in front and the Golf to my right. Gary took the gap and passed all three of us going into Potters. His are definitely high quality brass. The Golf then followed him through at Rifle, but out braked himself and kept going straight at Cocobana. I swarmed all over the back of the Escort in front of me and managed to take him going into the Esses. I set my sights on the Capri a little way off and put the hammer down. Coming around Potters again I was greeted by the sight of two cars parked up very close to each other in the run off area. The drivers were gesticulating wildly at each other. Not a planned stop over then. As I entered the Sweep and headed up the the final corner again I found Gary parked up on the side of the track. Later investigation would show a oil problem leading to spun bearings. The carnage of the race continued with the Capri I was chasing deciding to go farming in the Esses.

Eventually the race was over leaving five cars languishing around the track. While most of the damage was superficial, sadly, the very nice Renault Dauphine parked at Potters was a good metre or so shorter than it should have been.

And so ended a glorious day of racing on a fantastic track. The BMW was still in one piece, something both myself and, I'm sure Bruce, were very happy about. The racing had been fun and close and a good time was had by all. What more could one ask for?

As we headed back home, cars in tow, my tired brain wondered what it would have been like for Stirling Moss and his contemporaries back in the 60's after they had completed a Grand Prix. There were no hospitality busses, corporate tents or the trappings associated with the GP's of today. 

From what I have read of these great men I suspect they all clambered into someones Anglia and headed to the local pub for a pint or two and some late night carousing. 

Myself, I was just thankful to have been given the opportunity to walk, however feebly, in their great footsteps even if just for a fleeting moment.