Power clinches best championship place at Brands Hatch finale

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Mid Wales racing driver Ben Power clinched his best-ever championship finish in an incident-packed final weekend at Brands Hatch.

The 21-year-old from Welshpool finished seventh in the season-long UK Legends Car Championship after picking up valuable points in the final two-day event.

He survived a car fire before scoring a podium finish in the very last race of the year.

Saturday’s races were relatively quiet – working hard to “scrub in” new tyres, which he described as “like driving on ice”. He still managed two ninth places and a fifth.

He started the first of Sunday’s races from the front row and was running in second place, until when being pushed down Paddock Hill past another car, the car got out of shape and hit him in the side sending him into a spin.

Luckily, all the following cars avoided him and he rejoined the race, but a few laps later the engine started to leak oil, and before he could reach the pits, the car caught on fire. Power pulled in next to a marshals post, where it was put out.

The team managed to get the car out for race two where he finished 12th from the back of the grid.

The final saw him take the lead from a second-row start, but championship front-runners John Mickel and Lawrence Davey got past on the last lap, leaving Power to finish third.

“It was a real up-and-down weekend to finish a real up-and-down season,” said Power. “Overall, though seventh place in the championship is a good performance. If luck had been on our side, we could have ended much higher.

“It certainly shows we are progressing every year.”

Legends racing originated on the US oval tracks, and the cars have an American look, being 5/8-scale replicas of classic US models. Guttercrest Racing runs a Ford Coupe 1937 replica, with a 1250cc Yamaha motorcycle engine.

With identical cars and the fastest drivers having to start at the back of the grid, there is said to be more overtaking in a single Legends race than in a whole season of Formula 1. Motors TV broadcasts most rounds of the series.

Guttercrest Racing is backed by the family-owned aluminium guttering company Guttercrest, based in Oswestry. The team has further support from Cardiff-based PR consultancy Weltch Media, as well as Ripla Designs.