Dust or Bust: taking a £200 Nissan Micra grass-track racing

Each team must be made up of three drivers. By simply recruiting two of my best mates, I inadvertently formed a kind of grass-track super-team. Rob Shipp is an amateur rally driver and by a clear margin the most gifted car mechanic I know, making him easily the most important member of the team. Adam Gould, meanwhile, is pretty handy on the tools himself and was for a while one of this country’s most promising young rally drivers. He has led rounds of the British Rally Championship and won many stages, and is able to do things in a car that people like me can only dream of. 

Ah yes, and so we come to yours truly. I am no more handy with a spanner than I am with a clarinet, while my experience of driving competitively on the loose amounts to precisely nothing at all. But I would at least be supplying the car. 

Rob, Adam and I spent the day before the event preparing the Micra, which basically meant ripping out every unnecessary item, apparently to reduce weight. All the glass, other than the windscreen, came out (Rob delicately removed the rear screen by throwing a spanner through it: ‘Ah, so that’s what those things are for’, I thought). I made myself useful by applying our race numbers using duct tape. Cleverly, Rob also fitted an auxiliary radiator into the cabin because he knew the car’s original radiator would get filled with muck and quickly cease to function. He also replaced a couple of drive belts and fitted a proper racing seat, albeit a very old one, while Adam passed him tools and I helpfully checked Twitter. 

Our tyre strategy was a very simple one: we would use the tyres that were already on the car. Many other teams would fit knobbly rally tyres but, apart from the small matter of not having any of those, we also reckoned they’d put far too much strain on the hubs and suspension. However, we were at least smart enough to take the spare, which was an unused winter tyre and therefore the best one we had, and fit it on the front left corner, where it would be put to best use around the clockwise circuit. That left us with a single spare, meaning two punctures would put us out of the race. The final job was to replace the very worn out clutch with a brand new one. 

When we arrived on the day, we immediately felt as though we’d brought a banana to a gun fight. Everybody else had clearly put in rather more preparatory work than us. We had no doubt the little Micra would break down soon enough, or that we’d pick up a couple of punctures within the first 30 minutes, so our pit stop strategy called for very short opening stints to ensure all three drivers got a go. 

As described, my opening lap was a peach. But just as I was eyeing up the car in front for third position, a whole stream of much quicker cars came flying through from behind, dropping me right back down the order.

The course was a little less than a mile long with a good mix of tight and twisty corners and a couple of much quicker sections. The car was fantastic to drive in the higher-speed stuff. With so little grip, you could really bung it in and feel the back end sweep around as you turned in towards the apex. I started off using first gear for the chicane, second for most of the lap and third in the quick sections, but I soon realised second gear would be perfectly adequate for the entire lap, as long as I held the engine on the limiter for a couple of seconds in two specific parts of the circuit. 

That opening stint was enormous fun, but the hard, dry ground was like a washboard and the car rattled violently. I pulled in to the pits after 15 minutes, let Adam jump in and waited for the car to fail. 

But it just kept on going. Rob drove a longer stint, then I got back in and carried on. The dust got everywhere. If you followed another car closely, you’d be completely blind for whole seconds at a time. We had no idea how we were getting on but, while other cars had to pit regularly with problems, our little Micra happily chugged away. This was going okay; maybe we were even in the top 10. 

The other guys completed their second runs and I drove a short final stint, crossing the line after three trouble-free hours. The day was wrapped up with a prize-giving ceremony, led by Dan Moss. Starting from the bottom, each team was called out in order, along with their completed number of laps. When Dan reached 10th position and car 17 hadn’t yet been mentioned, I assumed we’d been forgotten. Then it emerged we had managed 86 laps, good enough for… fourth!