Saturday’s Royal Automobile Club Woodcote Trophy race at Spa was won from pole by the white D-type of Carlos Monteverde and Gary Pearson, although the early laps suggested the outcome could be very different. From the start, Monteverde had to fight tooth and nail to keep Simon Hadfield, in Irvine Laidlaw’s Ecurie Ecosse D-type, at bay.
Sadly, Hadfield’s D-type suffered a puncture after just a few laps, which put him out of the race and left yet another D-type to inherit second place: this one owned by Gary Pearson, and driven by him for the first half of the race. At the pit stop, Pearson handed his D-type to co-driver Andrew Smith and jumped into Monteverde’s D-type to finish – and win – the race, three and a half seconds ahead of his own car. Meaning Gary came both first and second, in two different D-types…
On the same lap but further back when the chequered flag fell was the Cooper-Jaguar of Derek Hood and John Young, superbly driven to a podium place, a very impressive result which included beating the fourth-placed Jaguar D-type of Nick Adams and Fred Wakeman by some six seconds.
Other class winners included Stephen Bond’s Lister-Bristol (in fifth place overall), the sixth-placed Jaguar C-type of Wil Arif and Jarrah Venables, the Aston Martin DB3 of Mark Midgley and Chris Woodgate (who managed to beat no less a competitor than the DB3 of Martin Melling and Rick Hall), and the Austin-Healey 100 of Martyn Corfield and Jeremy Welch.
Said Duncan Wiltshire of Motor Racing Legends, which organises the Royal Automobile Club Woodcote Trophy, “We were particularly pleased that the Spa round was such a close-fought and exciting event, as representatives from the series’ sponsor, EFG Private Bank, had made the effort to travel to Belgium to see this, the final Woodcote Trophy race of 2011.”
