As I passed the farm on the track leading to Anglesey Circuit, it dawned on me that I had not travelled this route for 20 years, and I recognised nothing. Back then, I knew the circuit as Ty Croes, named after the nearest settlement. It was a simple affair then, with only a selection of corners around this old Army and RAF base. My newbie status was further compounded in the driver’s briefing as I was among a few to raise their hands, having never raced here before. The realisation of what we were going to do hit me again when I raised my hand for having never raced for 24 hours.
This was truly a bucket list moment: a team of three to replicate one of my favourite races, Le Mans, and over 800 laps around one of the most scenic race tracks in the world. I was going to start out as a track novice, but if all went to plan, 24 hours later I would be a veteran of every inch of tarmac. My car for the journey would not be the fastest thing in motorsport - a Ford Ka - but hustling it around, maintaining momentum with twenty-two other Kas, definitely requires some skill, as various PH team members will attest to
This series, now five years old, has become the most accessible endurance motorsport around. You find actual Le Mans winners rubbing shoulders with ex-F1 team bosses, touring car drivers, and Dave from your local garage with his mates, all pedalling these 90mph monsters around the UK. But for 24 hours, you certainly need more people to support the car. While you could just rope in more friends, this year we opted to join a professional race team, Autotech Motorsport, to run our 555 SuKaru-liveried EnduroKa.
Autotech Motorsport were running three cars: their self-named number 65 car, the 333 car of KaHoona’s Race Team, and us. With only two pit boxes in front of the garages and a pit support team that could service one car fast, two cars at a pinch, but definitely not three at once, we had to time pit stops with precision. The first time to try this out was qualification, a two-hour affair, and one we opted to use for prepping tyres and the car rather than setting the timing screens alight.
Set in the sunset hours to include day and night qualification, this was the first time to experience a very dark Anglesey circuit as well as the setting sun. My first stint occurred with the solar alignment of the Rocket corner, the sun, and my eyeballs - not the ideal situation, but a great introduction to the challenges of the next day and it didn’t last too long. With a freshly installed pit-to-car radio, we navigated the session with inter-garage pit stop synchronicity and qualified 10th, seven-tenths off the pole position set by our stablemate 65 car.
I woke up on race day to another bright, sunny day on the coast of Wales to the noise of race teams up and down the paddock practising fuel stops, driver and tyre changes. By late afternoon, the car was prepped, we were psyched, and the race order and initial strategy were decided. I was to start the race with the instruction to bring it back at the end of the stint on the lead lap. We didn’t care about race position, just staying in touch with the leaders.
At 4:10 pm, a rolling start led us two by two out of Corkscrew onto the start straight. The lights went green, and I commenced racing that wouldn’t stop until the sun had returned to that position a day later. In my head, the adage “races are lost in the first corner” kept playing. I started tentatively, letting lunges or any 50/50 moves go the way of the rivals. It wasn’t ideal, and we had dropped to 16th after 15 minutes, but it allowed the frenetic midfield battles to die down a little, and I could start to pick up the pace and move back up the order.
A maximum stint in the car is dictated as 2 hours 20 minutes from pit out to the next driver pit out, which includes the stop - a regulation brought in to remove any chances of fitting the bigger SportKa fuel tank. The racing was very competitive, very close at times, but incredibly fair from all the drivers, a testament to the series and calibre of competitors. I slowly battled up to 6th by the time of a driver and remained on the lead lap, just - job done, stint objectives achieved.
I jumped out of the car, the refueller went on, the front-right tyre was changed, Tristan Judge jumped in, the team swarmed to strap him in, and off went the car into the afternoon light. Just a tad over three minutes total pit time - only three teams did the first pit stop faster, and two of them were our teammates. The Autotech Motorsport boys and girls were on it - but suddenly, there was a sting in the tail.
I returned to the pits, freshly changed from my race gear, to see where we had ended up after the first stops and saw we were 16th with a red note alongside our team number. We had been given a 10-lap penalty for a fuel infringement at the stop. I was gutted, the team was gutted; Tristan in the car, if we had told him, would have been gutted too. It was just one of those things - a bit of fuel spilled onto the floor and, as per regulation four, it was a slam dunk penalty. We were one of five teams to get it on the first stop.
Writing this up after the event, the feeling of despair - wanting to be at least in with a chance of winning as you enter the morning with no car issues - floods back to me. I felt like getting in my car and driving home rather than continuing on. A punch to the stomach, something accidental that felt grossly unfair. The fuelling through the years has been a real contentious issue in EnduroKa and hopefully something that will be sorted properly next year, but regardless of appeals, it stood, and there was nothing we could do. So we gritted out teeth, made do, and got on with it.
Up to the event, I had been incredibly focused on how you get three drivers around 24 hours with enough sleep, sustenance, pace, and coordination that you forget the mammoth effort to put on such an event. As Stuart Garland, MSVT Championship Manager, said in one of the comms, delivering a 24-hour event takes an enormous amount of effort behind the scenes too. Marshals, recovery teams, medics, timekeepers, race stewards, circuit staff, safety car drivers, and other volunteers also have to be prepared for any eventuality across the 24 hours. I cannot thank them enough for their efforts to allow us to compete in something as great as this.
Because of this gigantic effort from the orange army, some marshal posts are stranded in the centre of the track for the whole race. To combat that, the race organisers put out the safety car to deliver food to them - a timely rest for those in the car and on the posts, but a strategist’s nightmare. We had been waiting for safety cars to minimise laps lost in the pits, to gain back some of the penalty time, but the competitive racing had remained clean, and did so for the whole event. Most of the food delivery safety cars, through planning or luck, were not around key pit windows for most teams, with the first coming in the second stint - the point we chose to tell Tristan of the penalty.
There is a steely determination that goes through a team who feel up against it. As you navigate the grief curve of the penalty, denial turns to anger, which eventually turns into acceptance and then drives you forward to do the best job possible. As driver three, Chris Hilson, jumped out of his first stint and I set for the midnight hours, a broken belt buckle issue doesn’t faze us. It cost us another five laps, but the team went about it with ruthless efficiency to strip out the old system, install another, and send me on my way.
Sixteen laps off the lead, we were now up to 10th, and in what felt like a metronomic blur, we went through driver changes, tyre changes, fuel refills, and two-hour catnaps. Through the night, all three of us drove hard, fast, and consistently, determined to make something of the event. It paid off. As the darkness faded into early morning light, I stepped into the car for my next stint in 7th, now only 15 laps off the lead. And what a truly special stint this was.
I am not that spiritual, but put me in a race car, with some of the most beautiful vistas across the Irish Sea, and the sun glinting off the mountain tops of Snowdon, and I could be a believer. The car felt more alive than at any time in the previous 12 hours, and I had become so familiar with both the track and our little Ka that it felt effortless to lap around. Le Mans drivers nickname this time ‘happy hour,’ and I can see why. I set our team’s fastest laps of the whole event.
Despite another solar alignment through Peel corner and the apex, sixth place, then fifth, and finally fourth were taken. The in-car radio crackled to let me know my next target and where they were on track. The night had been tough, the penalty a blow, but we started the day with the hope that there was a small chance of a podium.
It felt like we had been going for eternity and were nearing the end, but we still had seven hours to go. Over 60 per cent of the races across an EnduroKa season are less than that distance, and we well know that a lot can happen in those races. True to form, the happy hour turned into a painful seven hours, and the glimpses of a podium turned into looking behind us.
The final stint was a painful one. We had lost power. The spiritual moments from my previous go had fallen firmly to earth, and we were now three seconds a lap slower. We still sat in fourth but were being caught at 2 seconds a lap, and the maths didn’t look good. I had to try and hustle the corners as much as possible, play with the heating to try and remove any heat from the engine as the sun shone down, and get some lap time. I just held on to fourth as I handed it to Tristan, who continued the same efforts, and finally Chris.
Chris battled hard, heating on full, sweating buckets, but alas, with an hour to go, it didn’t look like the podium runners were going to falter, and the car behind got through. It was a little frustrating, but the Ka had been a star through most of the race, and honestly, after two hours and the despair from being 16th after a penalty, we would have taken this. Post-race diagnosis found spark plug three not behaving itself, and there was a definite misfire as we loaded the car onto the trailer. So in all truth, we were glad just to finish.
Our Autotech Motorsport team did an amazing job throughout, and despite the seat belt issues, we had the fastest total pit stop times of all the teams. That testament to excellence continued with our teammates finishing in second place with the 65 car and the final podium-placed went to KaHoona’s Race Team - massive congratulations to them both. Also, big congratulations to the winners, MilnAir Racing, who performed with such amazing consistency to win by 12 laps over the rest of the field.
A top five finish in my first ever 24-hour race was amazing. To top it off, we were awarded the Dagenham Dustbin award for the best-presented Ka. This is voted for by the marshals who loved our ‘baby Scooby,’ as they called it. Frankly, we should be giving trophies to the marshals more than the other way round. I achieved a dream of finishing a 24-hour race, got a trophy, and felt happy with fifth place. The marshals stood in the sun, dark, and cold for 24 hours for the love of the sport, and I can’t thank them enough.
So would I race 24 hours again? Without a heartbeat’s hesitation, yes!
1 / 13
