Old Hairpin, Donington Park

This is a photograph I took from the straight between McLean's Corner and Coppice Corner of the field rounding Old Hairpin Corner on the first lap of the Pre-1961 Sports & GT Cars Race at the VSCC's SeeRed meeting at Donington Park in May 2011.

The two leading cars are an Austin Healey and a Lotus Elite, and as far as I can make out the 12 cars in the photograph are:

44  1955 Austin Healey 100M, Michael Thorne

59  1960 Lotus Elite, Robin Longden

7    1959 Lotus Elite, Brian Arculus

98  1955 Austin Healey 100M, Mark Pangborn

97  1954 AC Ace, Mark Morgan

49  1957 Aston Martin DB MkIII, Jon Gross

18  1955 Austin Healey 100M, Robert Rawe

5    1957 AC Ace, Andy Shepherd

65  1951 Bristol 401 ‘Mitchell Special’, Andrew Mitchell

47  1959 Aston Martin DB MkIII, Simon Jefferies

48  1955 Aston Martin DB2/4, James Campbell

85  1948 Frazer Nash High Speed, Ned Spieker

Bristol 401 'Mitchell Special'

I'd not heard of this car before I saw it at the SeeRed meeting at Donington Park in May 2011, but it's the Mitchell Special, based on an early 1950s Bristol 401 and you can read about it here. It was driven in the Pre-1961 Sports & GT Cars race by the builder of the car, Andrew Mitchell, and I took the photograph below during that race at McLeans Corner.

I would have liked to have included here a photograph of the standard Bristol 401, but on looking through my photographs it seems that I've never actually taken a photograph of one, nor of the virtually identical Bristol 403.