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.
