North Weald Drive/Car Limits days – The End of an Era!

[New Duke]

Many members of this club will remember these events at the North Weald Airfield firstly with Car Limits, run by Andy and, post covid, with Drive Limits, run by Mark.

MightyCondor and I attended a 12 car Drive Limits day there yesterday and had some great fun.

Sadly, Mark announced at the briefing that these events are to cease, possibly by the end of September, maybe with an extension to the end of the year. Drive Limits has a 3 monthly rolling rental agreement on the patch of land used for these events. However, Google have now agreed to buy the land for a reputed £88M, in order to build a data centre there

So, Mark, unable to secure another suitable venue, will be extending his time working for Porsche and doing some high performance road driver training. I asked Mark to drive my car for a demo run on the timed circuit. In a car he has not driven before, I was in awe of his ability to brake extremely late, turn in and put the car into an (impossible angle to me) back-end slide and recover the car with seeming ease. This he did on numerous occasions on the circuit, not once losing the car into a spin. He was complimentary about my car, but recommended I find a way to provide more bias to the rear brakes (noted!).

The end of these events prompted me to look back and see when I first introduced them to the club and was amazed to see the first one was in 2006, so nearly 20 years ago: viewtopic.php?f=165&t=11741&p=160654

The 20 car events have proved extremely popular with club members ever since, giving the opportunity to explore the limits of both car and driver, and have some fun on a few different timed circuits. Several of us also took part in 4 car training days with more advanced car handling training.

Sad to hear these events are coming to an end

Mark's demo drive:



My complete failure to control a slide:



A mediocre timed lap:

[casey]

I forgot to add we had a good variety of cars yesterday, and there always seems to be something interesting on the runway at the adjacent airfield. A Dakota with D-Day marking flew (pic below) and, later in the day, I noted another one taxiing near it, also with D-Day markings.