Motorsport

IN THE final race meeting of the year at Brands Hatch, several local drivers achieved very good results on Saturday.

Fresh from his 500th win two weeks ago, West Kingsdown's Rod Birley notched up two more successes with his Ford Escort WRC. In very changeable conditions, Birley qualified on pole position with a lap time more than two seconds quicker than anyone else and led away in the first race.

Initially, the track surface was quite wet, but the wind soon started to dry it out.

Opting to use intermediate tyres on the front of his car and wet-weather grooved tyres on the rear, Birley seemed to have covered his options. However, during the last few laps his front nearside tyre started to overheat and the 'slick' tyre-shod Dave Longhurst started to catch up with his Peugeot 206CC.

In the end, Birley held on by just over four seconds to secure victory.

It was much wetter for the second race and the Best Promotions team fitted wet-weather tyres all round.

From the start, the four-wheel drive Escort revelled in the conditions and Birley was over two seconds faster than any other car on the circuit.

On lap four, John Cross rolled his Seat Leon at the tricky Paddock Bend corner and the safety car was deployed while he was rescued, unscathed, from his upturned car. Birley's lead of over nine seconds immediately disappeared.

On the re-start, another Seat, driven by Andy Thompson, tried to hang onto the local driver, but soon slipped back into the clutches of Nick Starkey's Caterham. While these two battled over the runner-up spot, Birley calmly drove to his second win of the day.

Starkey took second just under three seconds adrift. Birley's win was his 19th of the season and his 15th at Brands Hatch.

This total meant that he had finished second in the 2009 winners' list for the whole country.

In the Cannon's motor spares Tin Top saloon races, Borough Green's Stephen Dann scored his first-ever race win and then followed it up with a second victory later in the day. In the first race, he withstood the attention of Anthony Harrison's Rover Tomcat to reach the chequered flag just 0.7sec in front. The margin of success was exactly the same in the second encounter, only this time Dann had to fend off the BMW Mini of Jason Richardson.

On his lap of honour, Dann praised his team's efforts to repair the turbocharger on his VW Golf in between the two races.

Wrotham's Gary Chappell competed in the same two races and took a win and a second place in the T2 class for smaller-engined cars with his Toyota Celica. Terry Searles, from Ash, unfortunately spun off in race one. Starting the second race from the rear of the grid, he steered his MGZR to second in the same class behind Chappell.