By Allan L

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It has been mentioned elsewhere that, as one of my motoring-related pastimes, I have been a licensed Handicapper for rather a long time: I thought some might like to read about it, so here is a rough outline of motor race handicapping and my involvement with it.

One of the many features of horse racing that were transferred to motor racing when Brooklands was inaugurated a century ago was handicapping. As with the horses, the idea was that to allow everyone a chance of winning, you had to accept that variations in potential performance had to be levelled out (and indeed the German term for the man who does it is “Aus­gleicher” (= equaliser)). As with the nags the early handicapping was done by adding ballast, and variations of that were still used in the TT in the late 1920s (and in Touring Car racing in the 1990s where rear-drive cars were ballasted to allow the front-drivers a chance).

A.V. Ebblewhite, the Brooklands Timekeeper, was probably the first to try letting the slower cars start with a time allowance over faster competitors. Because of the enormous width of that track, he could line them up as a single row along the start line and photos of him at work as the Starter show that he stood in front of the next car in line, presumably to show that it was not that car’s turn. The Health and Safety people would never countenance it these days!

Also because of the great track width, there was room for the first cars to pass the start line before all the quicker cars had been released, so starting time allowances could be longer than the expected time for a standing lap. At other venues where tracks were normal road width, a system of credit laps was developed to avoid the slow cars running down the cars that would otherwise still be on the grid.

That was the state of handicapping when I first saw a club motor race in the late 1950s. One such was the Eight Clubs’ Silverstone where the whole meeting was composed of handicap races, or scratch races that were selected from the entry to include cars of similar expected performance, regardless of appearance.

I had been a committee member of a Club called the Combined One-Make Car Club (COMCC) since a one-make club I was involved with had been a founder-member in 1961. Later COMCC had joined the Eight Clubs, and I found myself serving as a Club representative on its committee and therefore was looking for a suitable responsibility at the Silverstone Race Meeting. On a hunch I asked Robin Birchall, the Handicapper at that time, if he needed any help and he suggested I join him as a trainee, which I did in about 1972.

Robin had inherited the Handicapper’s role at the Eight Clubs from Denis Loveridge, who had inherited it from Charles Bulmer, one of the many staff members of The Motor who were involved. In the very early days, Charles had found time to compete at the meeting as well as Handicap – though presumably not in the same actual races. By the time I worked with him, Robin was also handicapping for MG Car Club and 750 Motor Club, a six-hour relay race in the case of the latter. My training and subsequent partnership with Robin included those and (briefly) Aston Martin O.C., and subsequently we added Bentley Drivers Club (BDC) Silverstone and other Relay Races to our portfolio as well as a number of single races at otherwise non-handicap meetings. In fact the only serious user of handicap racing we never worked for was the Vintage Sports-Car Club (VSCC), although we did some training of their handicappers, some of whom have helped us out in return.

The key to the task is knowing what the performance of every driver/car combination is. That means good record-keeping, and Robin’s (and later my) card-index was immense. Each competitor had a card with a brief description of car and driver and a lap time. The lap times were brought up to date on race day by using the data from timed practice and any previous races that had been run. As the lap times were changed we left the previous entries visible to give us the sense of the progression, a useful “extra” which we had to abandon when we computerised the data in the mid 1980s. I won’t attempt a detailed ex­planation of the methods by which we translated the lap times into handicap race start intervals: anyone who really finds it interesting can contact me directly. What I perhaps should explain is that our idea of “getting it right” is when all the cars finish the race together – and by together, I mean within the accuracy of the method. As we only keep records to the nearest second per lap, the method is only accurate to ± 1 second per lap (i.e. 10 sec. in a five-lap race. When we get a close finish between first and second, the commentators will say how well we have done, but that is not our view if there is then a large gap before the 10 seconds which has 25 cars in it.

Right from the beginning, there has been a battle of wits between competitor and handicapper. The details of the car given on the entry form, together with past performance, are supposed to be all we need, so the thinking devious competitor will find a way of introducing performance enhancements that do not involve any change to the data we are shown. A classic example of that was in the 1930s when Wally Hassan built a 4½ litre Bentley single-seater special for E.W.W. Pacey, he presented it for its first race with a very thick compression-reducing plate between the crankcase and the cylinder block. After it raced its performance was duly recorded by Ebblewhite, but what he didn’t know was that by the next time he saw it, the compression plate would have been reduced in thickness – and the extra power gave it just enough speed to do well, but not enough to draw unwelcome attention. That happened several times, I understand.

In our era we had a similarly improving supercharged P type MG, which turned out to owe its progression to a supercharger pulley that was machined a bit smaller from time to time, thus increasing the supercharge. We were quite proud that someone would go to so much effort to out-fox us.

What we don’t like, and nor do the rules, are deliberate attempts to mislead on the day. Slow practice laps followed by fast racing can lead to disqualification unless there are extenuating circumstances of which we are made aware. We don’t use that sanction very often, as we are supposed to know enough about the competitors not to be taken in.

For many years I had Daimler SP250s, and encouraged some other owners to take part in the Eight Clubs. SP250s had been raced in the past, notably by one Richard Crosfield whose car was developed by him and subsequent owners to be really quite a good racing car. Our chaps had cars that were pretty standard, running on whatever road tyres they thought suitable, so they were nowhere near Crosfield times, and surprisingly different from each other – but that’s what handicap racing is for and we did our best. From memory they were around the 1:20 to 1:23 mark, which leads me neatly to why it is that I do handicapping, rather than racing: at about that time there was a series of winter sprints that used the Silverstone Club Circuit, and as I did a bit of sprinting at that time, I had a go in my SP. Try as I might, I couldn’t get much below 1:30 as I could never get right the corners you couldn’t see round – had I had a navigator with pace notes I might have done better, but I settled for the idea that it is easier to tell people what they should be capable of than to do it oneself.

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