Mystery Monday: Olly Clark – I never assumed I’d be invited back to FoS, let alone get to win it again. Truly incredible!

I got back behind the wheel of Gobstopper II, the Roger Clark Motorsport-built Subaru Impreza, just two weeks ago – for the first time since winning in it at Goodwood in 2015. We’d done a lot to the car behind closed doors, including finding another 120bhp to take its output to over 900bhp! Most of the important work is done by my brother Matt – he’s the geek of the operation, although a handy pedaller, too. He decided he didn’t want to drive and engineer, so lucky old me gets to drive while he pores over the data.

Our love affair with Subarus started almost 25 years ago when my father, the late, great Roger Clark, and Matt started preparing rally cars. We got involved in the Impreza when it was new and soon offered power and handling upgrades. We also began to build our own demo car with huge amounts of power for the time. Following a brief interruption to help a chap from Iceland build a car to nail a nine-second quarter-mile drag run, we finished our car. There were lots of sceptics who didn’t believe we could get so much grunt out of an Impreza. And that’s the reason our first Time Attack car was called Gobstopper – to shut people up!

We finished second in Time Attack – a sprint series for highly modified cars that run against the clock at British circuits – in our first year in 2007 and won it in 2008 and ’09. More and more people wanted trick Scoobies so the business grew at a fair rate, although there are still only five of us here, including Matt and me. Mail-order parts supply is a huge element of what we do and we’re also proud to have recently helped Prodrive with Mark Higgins’ WRX Isle of Man record car, as well as Team BMR with the British Touring Car Championship Levorgs.

Once we’d outgrown the workshop at the family home, we relocated to new premises. I held off competing for a while to focus on the business, but work soon began on a new Gobstopper for Time Attack. And so Gobstopper II was born, with another Time Attack title secured in 2014.

The Festival of Speed has been a superb event for us. It’s given us a huge amount of exposure and two wins out of two is a great reward for the hard work the team has put in to the car.

As I said earlier, we found more power for 2016 and had a think about getting off the line at the start, which is crucial. I know my way up the hill pretty well now so my braking points and lines have never changed. It’s all about harnessing that power at the start.

The weekend was pretty tricky thanks to the weather. Friday morning’s first run wasn’t wet but the roadsweepers had smeared the muck into the asphalt so you had to be careful. We also tried a particular tyre, that I didn’t get on with, so that was that.

Friday afternoon was a bit better; we’d gotten rid of a few mapping issues we’d had earlier in the day, although we were still on wet tyres thanks to the dirty surface. The car felt better, so Saturday was looking hopeful.

And then it rained. A lot. Both runs were fairly meaningless, but seat and track time is always valuable. It helps with getting your head around what needs to be done. It was the same for everyone, of course, and we all hoped Sunday would be dry.

The final day dawned damp but no more rain was forecast so we just crossed our fingers that we’d have a dry Shootout in the afternoon.

During the morning run, which was again damp, the other four-wheel-drive cars, such as Liam Doran’s Citroen DS3, were nibbling away at us. We just had to stick to the plan; it was all about the final run.

How was my mindset coming into the Shootout? Well, this year I was last to go so looking in the mirror as I rolled up to the start and seeing no one behind was weird. And I made a point of not going within 50 yards of Kenny’s [Brack] McLaren [P1 LM] as we all lined up to run, or looking at the big screen near the GAS Arena!

I remember one of our guys, Paul, leaning into the car and calmly offering: ‘Just do what you do’. It was as simple as that.

With 2015’s start in mind (when I lost 0.5/0.6s off the line) I made the best getaway I’ve ever done. I had to remember the braking point at the end of the avenue was slightly different – I’m sure a tree I used as a marker in 2015 had gone! The second part of Turns 1/2 and the blast under the bridge went to plan, as did the kink and blind-brow approach to Molecomb. If you start getting too brave there it goes wrong. I was momentarily caught off guard at the Flint Wall as the right-hand apex bale stuck out a bit after the Renault Laguna clear-up operation. Watch the footage and you can see I give the bales and the wall maximum respect by keeping away. The penultimate right-hander was good but I had to have a little confidence lift for the last corner. It was flat last year when it was much warmer, but not this year. And the fact I was 6mph slower – 140mph against 146mph – over the line this year confirms that.

I had a pretty good idea that we’d done it by the crowd’s reaction at the top. What a superb feeling!

We’re already wondering how much closer we can get to Nick Heidfeld’s 41.6s record from 1999, given the right conditions. We reckon a high 43s would’ve been on this year with a warmer surface.

But that’s assuming we get invited back, of course. Three in a row really would be quite something!

Photography by Pete Summers and Jochen Van Cauwenberge