Behind the shutters: MG Owners’ Club Race Championship

Since 1981, the MG Owners’ Club’s Race Championship has given drivers of all skill levels a chance to race for an affordable sum. Run to strict safety standards, differing little from how they left the factory, MGs from Abingdon, Cowley and Longbridge compete on circuits the length and breadth of the UK. Now run in association with Lancaster Insurance Services, we caught up with Race Championship co-ordinator Jim Baynam to see how one gets involved.

Regularly televised, and live streamed online, racing is fast, close and – by motorsport standards – cheap. The Owners’ Club can provide more information about getting started in the Championship. Cars – closely related to their production counterparts apart from safety equipment, specific tyres and engine outputs – are divided into four classes.

Classic Class caters for the MGB, MGB GT, MG Midget and Austin-Healey Sprite. Class B looks after the less powerful front-wheel-drive MGs: the ZS 120, Maestro 1600, EFi and the Montego. Class F, as the name denotes, is for the MGF VVC and MGTF, with Class Z reserved for the faster Z cars, the ZR 160 and ZS 160.

LIS: Why would you want to race? Track days are cheaper.

Jim Baynam: “It depends if you want to drive around a racetrack, or if you want competition. Track days are specifically and seriously controlled as being non-competitive. You’re not allowed to do lots of things on a track day, like diving up the inside.

“You're not racing. You're driving round against yourself. And you're forbidden from certain manoeuvres going into corners and this, that and the other. You can only overtake on the left, and you can't out brake people in the corners, because then penalties occur.

“I think you either have a competitive streak or you don't.

“And that's not what track days are about. If you want to be competitive and you want to pit yourself against other drivers, then you have to go racing. And it also improves your craft as a driver.”

LIS: By making the cars the same by class, does it make the racing fairer?

JB: “It gives everyone a reasonable chance. It gives a chance for people to come in on the first rung of the ladder at reasonable cost and get out and compete. And if they like it, they can put more time and a bit more money into it.

“All the MGBs are much the same power, all the ZRs are much the same power, and so on. It all comes down, then, to your ability as a driver and your ability of twiddling with the car to get the most out of it.

“They all have to run proper dashboards. They're not stripped out. They look like standard cars. Okay, obviously strip out the passenger seat and the carpets and all the trim and all that, but they still have to have a lot of the interior.

“With my MGB, I have to run standard SU carburettors, a standard gearbox, but with uprated, stiffened suspension and very limited engine modifications. You have to run fairly production-based camshafts and that sort of thing.”

LIS: What sort of costs are involved?

JB: “The start-up costs are high. Buy a car, you’ve got to put aside at least £1,000 to buy overalls, helmet, gloves, boots, balaclava and all that stuff. But once you've got all that, of course you don't have to buy it again. And you can spread the costs, the initial costs, over some years.”

LIS: And what about buying a car and the running costs?

JB: “You can get a really nice MG ZR for £6,000. MGBs will cost you a bit more, primarily because of the high value of an MGB these days. I know of three or four MGBs that would be for sale. You’d probably have to pay £8,000 for one of those.

“My MGB engine, if I do a full season, would need a rebuild every other winter. You can go through the season on two sets of brake pads, and probably half a dozen tyres.

“Then you've got the entry fees, which are expensive these days, for a 15-minute qualifying session and two 20-minute races, which is what we have every meeting. We now pay £430 – it’s never been a cheap hobby.

“If you do a full season of seven meetings, entry fees will cost you £3k. Then, of course, you've got your petrol costs and your travelling costs and whatever.

“The car could then be sitting out there in the garage. It doesn't need huge amounts of maintenance. Once you've got the car, the overalls, the helmet and the kit, you've got everything.”

LIS: How did the Race Championship get started?

JB: “The MG Car Club has got a much longer history of motorsport than we had. They gave us an initial route into MG racing.

“I started off just as a novice competitor. But the MGB that I bought had been raced for a number of years by quite a well-known MG specialist.

“Those guys knew all about racing. I didn't. One of the other guys, who was a friend of Richard Monk (MGOC General Manager), he started racing at the same time.

“We all sort of got together one day and said: ‘Well, let's put a championship together.’ I decided that was the place for me. So I started off in 1981, racing with the MG Owners’ Club when the Championship started, and I was nothing more than another competitor until 1987.

“The guy who was running the Championship then, Dave Jarvis, was good friends with Roche Bentley and Richard Monk of the Owners’ Club.

“Dave ran it for about three or four years before he handed it over to another guy who ran it for two or three years. He wanted to move on, and so I took it over. I took over the day-to-day running of the Championship, if you like, in 1988.

“I became the sort of de facto organiser at that time. It was purely a sort of honorary position. I've never worked for the MG Owners’ Club, but I ran the championship. I started running the championship as, for want of a better word, the co-ordinator in 1988. And I'm still doing that role now.”

LIS: Do the cars run to different standards now to how they ran back then?

JB: “When we started in 1981, it was only MGBs and MG Midgets. We never had any T-types or early cars. From ’81 till the late 80s, we ran a class for production-based, what you might call ‘standard cars’, in other words, with some very limited performance modifications.

“But we also ran a class for more modified cars with higher-spec engines and this, that and the other. There were two classes then of standard cars and modified cars, but they all raced in the same race, just split into two classes.

“Round about the mid-80s, the desire for running these more modified cars began to drop off. So the Owners’ Club Championship decided to drop that class, and it became purely a class for production-based cars. Since about 1986, it's been production-based.”

LIS: Did the front-wheel-drive MGs change the Race Championship much?

JB: “People started racing the MG Maestro, and they became hugely popular. We had loads. And that was the heyday of the MGOC championship. The MG Maestro might seem a bit staid now, but in its day it was big stuff, it was high profile, some of the events were televised and some of them were supporting big events. I don't think they ever supported the British Grand Prix, but it was big stuff.”

LIS: Really?

JB: “The Maestros became very fashionable. People were buying them and putting them out as race cars, with roll cages and lower suspension, and away you go. On some occasions, we had enough MG Maestros to have a race of their own, just for MG Maestros, and another race for what you might call the ‘Abingdon’ cars, the MGB and the Midget.”

LIS: The MGF changed things again, we imagine.

JB: “Eventually, the Maestro began to get a bit long in the tooth. By that time, the MGF had been launched. After two years, the same thing happened. MGFs started coming on the second-hand market and people running Maestros tended to go over to the MGF.

“So the Maestros dropped off and the MGF took over. And then, of course, a couple of years after that, they launched the ZR series, the MG ZR. Once again, after a couple of years, they started becoming available on the market, so they were being raced by this stage.

“Of course, virtually nobody was running a Maestro by then because they'd all switched over to MGFs, or the ZR. While all this was going on, the MGBs and the Midgets were still battling on, same as they had been since 1981.”

LIS: Did the class system change to accommodate these new cars?

JB: “We had the Abingdon cars in one class. We had the MGFs in what we call Class F, logically, and Class Z, for the ZRs, and that's how it stands to this day. There are still one or two Maestros that come out with us, and they actually go in Class B.

“There is still a class for the MG Maestro. We have one guy who turns up in his MG Maestro. He's a bit lonely in his class, but he turns up, and he loves it.”

LIS: OK, say someone’s interested. What would they need to do?

JB: “I've had probably hundreds of people wanting to start racing. And the first thing I tend to do is speak to the Owners’ Club.

“Or I may email a very good document, which we call our starter pack, which tells them all they need to know, assuming they're a complete novice.

“And I say: ‘Well, you've got to get a competition licence. You've got to get a car. You can either buy a car, or you can build your own car from a road car up into a race car. All the bits are available.

“The starter pack tells them all of that information in relatively simple terms: how to go about getting a licence, what the options are now for buying or building a car, roughly what it's going to cost, how they go about it, what it's all about.

“A lot of people have received that document. It’s been sent out hundreds of times over the years. A modest proportion of them follow it through to buying a car and getting on the grid.

“Those people do say that starter pack was really good. It really puts it in clear, simple terms what you’ve got to do, what it's going to cost you and how you've got to go about it. But on the other hand, of course, people like me are on the end of the phone, and I've talked to people regularly about it. I send them the starter pack and they have the initial conversation.”

LIS: Any tips for those starting out?

JB: “The one thing I say to people all the time, as you can probably imagine, is whether you're racing an MGB, an MGF or a ZR, it's always cheaper to buy a ready-built car than it is to convert one yourself.

“You get a better car, you get one that's probably got a little bit of competition record or history, and it saves you a huge amount of time and a huge amount of money.

“The starter pack that we do tells people just that you can either buy a car that effectively complies with the regulations and is virtually ready to race, or if you've got, say, an MGB or a ZR, you can build it up yourself and buy the suspension bits and do this and buy a roll cage.

“But unless you're a pretty handy mechanic, you’ve got to start getting somebody else to do the build and you can end up with a very large bill.”