Ask any marshal, photographer or motorsport fanatic of a certain age to name their favourite club racing era and “the 1970s and 1980s” will win hands down. Special/Super Saloons would surely top a sub-poll, for sheer variety and ingenuity of home-builds, the quickest and most spectacular wild caricatures of production cars often hiding outrageous engine transplants and proprietary racer’s suspension. Towards 50 years ago, when the genre was at its height, the crowd following was strong too, with ebullient maestro Gerry Marshall never far from the winner’s rostrum.
Since 2012, the Classic Sports Car Club’s retrospective – embracing the contemporary Modified Sports category, with more restrictive regulations – has rekindled the flame, bringing out some of the wackiest racers ever to emerge from workshops, lock-up garages and literally garden sheds. Revived to offer a competitive home for long-dormant ‘classic’ hardware, it’s bolstered by a ‘modern’ take on the theme with bespoke tubeframe chassis and current power units offering viable options with a Donington/Special GT-type flavour, another category that ebbed away in the early 1990s.
