Looking across the front of Chris Mann’s Alfa Romeo Disco Volante towards, on the left Tania Pilkington’s Superb Maserati 300S and on the right Justin Beckett’s AC Ace Bristol preparing to go out for qualifying. The Alfa 1750GS Zagato is pretty damned good too! Photo - JT

Preamble 

This was, in effect, the VSCC Spring Start meeting pushed into the middle of the season and renamed ‘The Hawthorn Trophy Meeting’ but the content was unaltered. The VSCC are very much hoping that the meeting will return to its April date for next year, and equally, FISCAR hope to be invited again.

The VSCC have introduced a new series for Pre 1955 drum braked sports cars, and indeed, initially they intended to run a separate race for these cars at this meeting, with FISCAR having its own race - ‘The Tom Cole Trophy Race’ for our cars. In the past, we have often included just a few ‘invitation’ non compliant cars to this race but last year and this, entries have been restricted solely to FISCAR/VSCC members with FISCAR compliant cars. Given the revised date for this meeting, and recent experiences, I was not entirely convinced that we could put on a decent sized grid and even less so that the VSCC would have sufficient entries for their own race either. In the event, the VSCC made the right decision to merge the two races. This actually reflected our joint races in the past (see previous Tom Cole Race reports) with the exception that the VSCC contribution to this race excluded the later 1950s sports racers.