Watch Charles Rainford hit the hill at Chateau Impney Hillclimb in the John Rhodes Mini Cooper S.
VIDEO: John Rhodes Mini at Chateau Impney Hillclimb
VIDEO: In-car highlights from 77th Members Meeting
In-car video highlights from our 77th Members Meeting.
Goodwood 77th Members Meeting
Goodwood’s season opening, 77th Members Meeting was as great as any Members Meeting before it. Even without all the snow! For many weeks we’ve been in preparation for the Betty Richmond Trophy. Getting our FIA Appendix K Mini Cooper S ready to do battle with 59 others. We decided early on that we were going to put in a good effort and make the most of this opportunity. The original engine wasn’t making enough power to compete with most of this grid so we chose to build a new one. We went to Swiftune for many of the internal components and built ourselves an engine with comparable performance.
Charles Rainford was to pilot the car, however, other than one test session he was new to racing Minis. Even still, in qualifying he brought the car home in 16th out of 30 cars. The first heat was Saturday afternoon and after a long, 4-car, battle Charles managed to finish 13th. In doing so he clinched a much desired spot in Sundays final. Sundays final race was fairly straight forward and despite an overheating clutch issue, in addition to a slow puncture we finished the weekend 24th overall out of 60 Minis. We couldn’t be happier with this result. Thanks to Chris Harper and Mini Sport for all their help. If you are interested in reading about how to build an FIA Appendix K Mini and how we built our car, check out our BOOK.
Charles Rainford blitzes Goodwood hill in John Rhodes Mini – in car video
We had the pleasure of running the John Rhodes Mini Cooper S at the 2018 Goodwood Festival of Speed. John is 90 years old now and asked our Charles to drive it up the hill for him. The times got better with each run. His best time of 62.3 was in the Final Shootout on Sunday afternoon beating the Alan Mann Escort by a tenth of a second.
Charles Rainford wins at Snetterton
Charles Rainford scored his first overall win last weekend at Snetterton. He secured pole position and the win driving our Marcos 1800GT in the HRDC All stars race. Following some recent mechanical failures the repaired Marcos was on top form despite the heat wave. We also ran Ian Burford in the Bill Thomas Cheetah but struggled to keep the car cool in the record high summer temperatures. The experience will go into the development of this unique racer.
