This was the final race in the 2009 calendar of ‘Open’ races and once again it was amalgamated with the Aston Martin club’s so-called Super GT series.  This meant that the Ferraris were up against a motley selection of automobilia, ranging from a Vauxhall Belmont to a super-quick GT700 (we are still not sure what that is) and there was even a Chevrolet  Camaro.

The Ferrari entry was straightforward:  nine 355/Chs and the ‘388GTO’ of Marco Pullen as well as the F512M of Alan Cosby and the Chris Rea 308GT4 driven by Richard Hodson, although this ran in the Super GT category rather than ‘Ferrari Open’.

As before there is no race report available from the organisers for us to post, so we can only record that the heavily-modified 328 of Marco Pullen was quickest of the Ferraris in qualifying (and third fastest overall), and the 355/Chs of Mick Dwane and Dave Tomlin were next up.

In the race, over 20 laps, Pullen was the leading Ferrari and held a strong third place overall, but retired with mechanical woes on the final lap, whilst the two quickest 355s ran almost together for the entire race and finished just two seconds apart in fourth and fifth place overall.  Graham Reeder and Mark I’Anson finished sixth and seventh, again just a couple of seconds apart.

There was some good racing throughout and David Tomlin had a good view of the action :

"We had a rolling start and a couple of the powerful things ahead hesitated and got in my way.This allowed Reeder and I'Anson to get past me at the start. Marco in his 'S' class car was out ahead of us all race and on average about 1.5 seconds a lap quicker so we didn't see much of him until on the last lap we saw him parked up on the side of the track before Bridge, a mechanical failure I believe.

"On the second lap I got past I'Anson and then the trio of Reeder, Dwayne and Tomlin pulled away. On lap 5 all three of us went up the main straight side by side! Soon Dwayne was past Reeder and it took me a couple of laps to get past Reeder under braking at Abbey. In the meantime Dwayne had pulled a gap of four seconds but although I chased hard and even set a new lap record of 1.32.9 I could only close the gap to two seconds as he drove well and didn't make enough mistakes."

And that was the end of the Ferrari Open series for the year. There’s many racing Ferraris out there in various other series but our restrictive regulations do not allow them into the Club’s series, leading to the woeful dearth of numbers.  We expect there will be some imaginative response from the rule-makers to this predicament.

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Next up: TBA

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