The Saturday race was run in rain but the forecast for Sunday, when I was going, was much better. A good run down to Brands Hatch in sunshine (shades required) saw me arrive mid-morning just before the Remembrance Sunday curfew. 

Britcar has been around for nearly 20 years and aims to provide multi-class endurance racing. Looking for somewhere to race the new BT62, David Brabham took up the chance to race in the Invitation class accompanied by Will Power albeit with some power restrictions to meet Britcar rules. Saturday’s race saw a debut win for the BT62.

In Britcar there’s cars I hadn’t seen racing before including the Praga R1T - an outlandish looking device.

The Saker RAPX with more of a Group C era feel to it.

There’s TCR spec cars like the VW Golf …

The occasional BMW …

… and the obligatory Ginetta G55

Quickest in warm up was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Brabham.

I was at Clearways for all these photos using the 200-500mm zoom. The sun was low in the sky meaning there were deep shadows requiring some post processing. As ever, I was shooting in RAW and then editing with Polarr.

A range of races for Ginetta Juniors, Minis and a two hour race for Citroen C1s followed until it was time for the two hour Britcar race which started just as the sun was setting. 

Soon enough, the pace car peeled off the track and the Britcar race was underway. With the increasing darkness, the ISO was set to increase and I had swapped to the 70-200mm zoom. 

There were early problems for the Saker with a spin …

This would have been OK, had the Seat Cupra TCR not then clobbered the rear corner, damaging the suspension and sending the wing flying !

Darkness set in very quickly. There’s an interesting sort of semi-starburst effect with the LEDs – there’s no filter being used here.

Confirming the “run what ya brung” ethos, the grid goes from Ferrari 488s to the Smart ForFour which hadn’t run in warm-up and thus somewhat surprised me !

At Druids, there is a neat rear shot with no fence in the way and marshals in the background. Thanks as ever to the volunteer men and women in orange without whom we could not enjoy our motorsport.

There is a photographer’s window at Druids with a great view back to Paddock framed by the Brands Hatch branded bridge.

I’d driven round from Clearways to park behind Druids earlier in the day – this includes bridges over the Grand Prix loop. I reckon the last time I was at Brands for a race on the full circuit was 1968 to see Jo Siffert win the Grand Prix in the Rob Walker Lotus 49 … I intend to put that right next year ! The dark gives a very different photo at Clearways.

A nice feature of the Nikon D850 is the ability to understand and adjust exposure for oncoming headlights rather than just over-exposing the whole photo. The lack of fencing is again welcome looking back to Surtees.

Walking round from Clearways towards the Brabham Straight, there are overlaps in the fence to allow marshals access to the track and which give us snappers a rear shot of the racing. 

For the final couple of photos, I went for a panning shot through the fence. By now the ISO was at 8,000 and this was very much an experiment. Of course, we may well be back at Brands for the Circuit Rally Championship in January, so there was a good reason for trying these shots out. 

For my final shot, here is the winning BMW 1M of Moss and Hancock.

Results can be found at TSI Timing

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