Race report by Steve Sykes: How many of you knew there was a race circuit on Anglesey? Hands up those who did… hmm. Thought not. To describe it as tucked away would be an understatement. Having left the A55 and worked your way through the Welsh lanes, when you are finally confronted with a sign saying Anglesey Circuit (or Trac Mon, to be accurate – this is Wales, remember), and this being the point where normally you have arrived at the circuit… it is then necessary to drive off the end of the earth to get there (or so it feels)…

Once you’re actually there, it is a delight; beautiful views (it’s right by the sea), helpful staff, good viewing for spectators, and, the weekend we went, exceptional sunny weather (this may have been because it was the same weekend as the Goodwood Festival of Speed, and Lord March seems even to have the weather on his side every year); although it would appear that we may have been lucky as the marshals posts seem to have been built to resist the average tsunami.

And the lawns… the grass on the inside of the circuit would not have looked out of place in the Enclosure at Royal Ascot, or Wimbledon. They are proud of their grass; to the extent that anybody who drove on them was summoned immediately to the Clerk of the Course and shot. The last time the 2CVs visited, some circuit upgrades had just been finished and there were no kerbs. On querying this, the drivers were told ‘we’ll wait and see where you go wide and then we’ll put the kerbs there’ which seemed sensible.

There are one or two drawbacks, not least that the control tower is positioned so that when you are on the pitwall it nicely blocks your view of the back half of the circuit. Also it is the only place I have ever been where the performance driving school car is an old model Toyota Avensis; depends on your interpretation of the word ‘performance’ I suppose. And questions have to be asked as to why the 2CV drivers, having been summoned to the assembly area in what could be described as a preremptory and urgent fashion, were then left to bake in the sun, in their overalls and helmets, expecting to go out on track at any minute; while a two seater Legends car gave circuit rides to all and sundry, none of whom wore race overalls or any form of protective clothing beyond a helmet, and which only came to an end when it broke down.

In case you’re thinking ‘what about the race’, this was kind of what it felt like on Saturday as the Legends car droned round… and round… When the 2CVs eventually got under way the curse of the pole sitter struck again as Sammie Fritchley, on her birthday (not saying which one) lost out at the flag to Nick Paton by all of 0.365 seconds. You’d think the polite thing to do would be to let the lady win on her birthday, wouldn’t you? In a brilliant third was young Peter Rundle (all of 17) ahead of Wayne ‘Gadget’ Cowling and Alec Graham put in an exceptional drive to fifth after starting from the back of the grid because he had not set a time in practice. Michael Fox had a strange race; starting from eighth he fell back down the field, then about half way through appeared to discover another gear or some additional accelerator pedal travel, moved back up several places and then fell back again to finish in the penultimate position. Odd.