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Grim and Lol
Published February 20th at 1:19pm
In 1992 my first wife and I got divorced and I let my hair down and started getting more serious about having fun with my GT40 replica. Somehow I came across an amazing opportunity - drive your car on a two week trip around race circuits in France and Spain. A full day at the track followed by hours driving to the next luxury hotel. All inclusive, lots of fun and probably not that cheap. What did I care, I was free!
So in October 92 I went on "Les Circuits" and joined 20-30 other weirdo's in a strange collection of cars on the ferry to France. There was everything from a rich executive in his porsche 911 track car with multi-thousand dollar brakes to an old Austin A35.
The first day of course no-one knew each other but that changed very quickly. A bunch of guys in racing cars doing nothing but driving fast on tracks and sometimes faster on the roads in between.
It was undoubtedly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
As will become expected by you as you read more of this story, I went off after less than an hour on the circuit. Went off as in, I got a little too excited while chasing another car into a corner and ended up in the gravel trap.
Red faced I was dragged back to the pits to assess the damage. Lots of gravel to empty from the bottom of the car, but only one thing broken - the center fell out of water pump pulley. And I have a 302 Ford V8, probably never used anywhere in Europe in production.
In rural French village, pop 1000. Hmmm.
But, this is what defines "unusual" car ownership to me. Whether you are driving a race car, hot rod or just a classic old car, you'll usually find plenty of people to help. So when I was towed into said small French village I had no clue what would happen next - but there at the same garage were two blokes with caterham sevens; one in pieces. The same one that had goaded me into the gravel trap :)
It got better. The two fellow racers were instantly friendly (actually, crazy might have better described them, but if you've ever driven for hours in a Caterham Seven in October you might say that crazy was a given..) and one of them was a pilot with other pilot friends. Yes, pilot friends who were preparing to fly a new gearbox out to them and would I like anything bringing for my car? Why, yes I would! A quick call to GTD and a courier was winging a water pump pulley to the airport.
Grim, Lol and I were inseperable after that and spent the next two weeks racing around France and Spain in a testosterone-induced haze. Grim, by the way, was the name given to him after his habit of farting in elevators. I kid you not. He's of course grown up and become a well thought of sort of chap, lots of responsibility, etc so I'll without hesitation have to publish his full name; Paul Harvey. Otherwise how would Google help all his friends and family find these useful facts? Yeah, Paul Harvey.
Lol is just Lawrence, no farty stories there. Just being Lol is enough, trust me. Lol and his wife Dor are the kind of eccentric English couple you see drinking gallons of Pims at a village fete wearing leather helmets and goggles.
The GT40 and the sevens are very different kinds of car. I thought the '40 was light at 2200lbs, but not in comparison with a seven. The big fat iron block 302 had loads of torque, but the seven didn't need much torque. An aluminum 2 liter 4 cylinder did just fine.
An example: At the Paul Ricard circuit there's a 0.9 mile long straight - that's long. I could wind the '40 up on the straight, overtaking many small cars. The sevens topped out at ~130mph ish. So I'd go flying past until the right-angle bend at the end of the straight. And the next bend, and the next. Crossing the start-finish line the sevens had easily caught up and flew past me. Luckily there was just one more corner before the straight and the cycle repeated.