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conceivably have had a continuous racing history. So why aren't the authorities preventing
this?
The RAC MSA (formerly the Motor Sports Association) is the UK's motor sport
administrator. It issues permits to events covering the way they are run in terms of safety,
administration, marshalling and insurance. It also hands down and governs racing car rules
from the French-based Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). Neither of these
administrations have a God-given entitlement to administer motor sport; more like
squatter's rights. The MSA has no parliamentary mandate but, in the wildest, early years of
UK motor sport (then as the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland), it fought off all
comers (particularly the Motor Union and powerful clubs such as the Midland Automobile
Club) to run motor sport. After the total ban on public-road motor sport in March 1925, the
RAC became and remains the de facto governor of UK motor sport.
While individual clubs and organisers can invite whomsoever they damn well please to
their race and hilldimb meetings, the overall rulebook governing Historic motor sport is
FlA's Appendix K. This is a 103-page chunk of dead tree, described as 'outdated and
meandering' by one competitor and 'imperfect science' by Simon Hadfield, former chairman
of the FIA's Historic technical commission and proprietor of a thriving race preparation
business.
'It's not perfect,' admits Rod Parkin, long-standing chairman of the MSA's Historic
committee and that rare thing, an approachable Yorkshireman. It starts well, though, and
Parkin quotes from the opening paragraph: 'Historic cars may be used for competitions
under a set of rules that preserve the specifications of their period and prevent the
modifications of performance and behaviour, which could arise through the application of
modern technology. Historic competition is not simply another formula in which to acquire
trophies, it is a discipline apart, in which one of the essential ingredients is a devotion to the
cars and to their history. Historic motor sport enables the active celebration of the history of
the motor car.'
These are Corinthian ideals indeed, though in today's scarily competitive Historic arena
even Parkin admits that things have changed. 'Cars have been adapted,' he says, 'as younger
people start to drive them, who don't have such mechanical sympathy'.
Of course, he's too polite to mention super-rich owners with the ethics of weasels, or pro
drivers and teams with win-at-all-costs philosophies and ends-justify-the-means methods.
Not all of them are like that, of course, but there are enough out there to skew the balance.
Nothing wrong with that, you might think, they all work to the same set of rules. Except
they don't.
As Hadfield explains: 'Appendix K is a good set of rules, written by good people and based
on good advice. The aim is an elegant, all-embracing and encompassing structure that
enables a level playing field all around the world, but it's been undermined by the "golden''
rule, which is that people with the gold can choose to ignore the rules.' Significantly; he
adds: 'Development in Historic racing should be an oxymoron. But it happens.'
You might (or might not) be slightly horrified at the things we've heard in the process of
researching this article: Ford Cortinas 'developed' in wind tunnels, 1950s saloons on shaker
rigs, lever-arm dampers so filled with unobtainium they cost more than £2000 a corner,
E-types with such radically lowered suspension that differentials and floors are refabricated
and moved, Historic cars with programmable traction control via CAN-bus modern
electronics, cars bathed in acid to lose weight, cars completely remade to move suspension
pick-ups into more favourable locations, and all of it disguised with the ingenuity of a Q
Ship builder.