Thank Frankel It's Friday – How Get Into Historic Racing.. Affordably

Our conversation didn’t last long but it was clear he’d become accustomed to seeing my name popping up in various car-related titles, usually attached to articles about very fast, very expensive road and racing cars. A 50-year-old sit-up-and-beg 1.6-litre saloon car that clearly wasn’t going to win anything didn’t really compute with his understanding of how I chose to spend my time.

But it is. I enjoy very much those massively powerful or unimaginably valuable cars it is sometimes my very great fortune to drive, but it is a serious business. You have to find a balance between driving it fast and hard enough to be able to provide an honest impression of what it is like to operate the way its maker intended while, at the same time, taking no risks with it at all. Often you are at a strange circuit, sometimes with inconvenient weather, you almost always have fewer laps than you’d like and more often than not there’s an owner fretting on the pit wall, gnawing his nails to the bone while you try to understand in 20 minutes a car you’d ideally like a couple of seasons getting to know. I’m not complaining for I know better than anyone how blessed I am to do this stuff but, to be honest, much of the enjoyment comes retrospectively, having handed the car back without having put so much as a mark on its body or an unauthorised revolution on its tachometer.

Not so in the old Alfa Giulia. Yes, the consequences of rolling it into a ball could be costly and embarrassing, but they’re unlikely to end my career or land me in debtor’s prison, so I can afford to take a rather different approach and enjoy the moment as well as the memory. And take it from someone who’s done it a bit, you’ll struggle to have much more pure fun behind the wheel of a car. Of course there is none of the occasion you find when driving a 1950s sports prototype racing Ferrari at the Goodwood Revival, no sense of the extraordinary privilege that being allowed to do so represents. The memories won’t last a lifetime and at the end you probably won’t find yourself weeping into your helmet for all sorts of confused and conflicting reasons, but mainly out of joy, relief and the fear you won’t be asked again. But you will find yourself still laughing about it many days later, as I do now.

Nor do I single out the Giulia as the sole provider of this kind of experience. On the contrary, having watched and spoken to my co-competitors from the Historic Racing Drivers Club racing a delightfully random assortment of Morrises, Austins, Rileys, Hillmans, Fords and so on, it’s quite clear that all you really need is a nicely balanced car with no grip.

In the event our already considerable driving pleasure was augmented further by rain, requiring drivers to spend almost all 45 minutes the race lasted steering to the left on a track populated largely by right hand corners. Though Redgate, the Old Hairpin, Macleans and Coppice we’d all aim our noses into the apex, then frantically steer the other way to catch now flailing tails, then power on and drift through, feeling like Jochen Rindt but at half the speed, hooting with laughter. For sheer, simple fun, it gets no better than that.

Actually the Alfa is one of the more expensive cars at the affordable end of the grid. If you bought one of the HRDC’s little Academy Austin A35s – probably £15,000 in ready to race form – I reckon you’d have almost as much fun in a car that won’t depreciate much and all for the price of a new Ford Fiesta. And the bloke was wrong about not winning anything: there are always class honours to fight for and on Monday I won mine and have the pot to prove it. So there.

Why this now? Because I believe there are so many people out there whose only regret if they tried affordable historic motor sport would be that they didn’t do it sooner. And maybe you’re one of them. The cars are great to drive, their drivers always good company. Driving standards are generally if not uniformly good and a race weekend always provides you with something to look forward too however grim the intervening week might be. In short racing old cars is the most fun a certain sort of person can have. Frankly and so long as it was properly prepared and went sideways, I’d race a Unigate-sponsored historic milk float.