Racing to remember: On track with the charity supporting injured military personnel
The Race of Remembrance is motorsport’s tribute to the fallen and a chance for veterans to team up for a common cause. It’s a truly special event, over a special weekend, in which Nik Berg was honoured to take part
At 11am on Remembrance Sunday a silence descends on Trac Môn, the racing circuit in Anglesey, just as it does at services throughout Britain. What makes this moment of calm reflection so poignant is that it comes in the middle of 12-hour endurance motor race and that fireproof suits have been temporarily swapped for military uniforms and medals.
This is the Race of Remembrance, run by Mission Motorsport and now in its eighth year – the flagship event for a charity whose motto is Race, Retrain, Recover.
Mission Motorsport founder James Cameron spent 17 years in the Royal Tank Regiment, losing friends and seeing others visibly and mentally scarred by their service, and set up the charity in 2011 to help others have a life after the military. Through Mission’s training, mentoring and support more than 200 wounded, injured and sick ex-service men and women have found employment, while over 2,000 veterans have found work thanks to its charity programs.
“Most of our work is actually around helping people get new careers after the military, and the sport is the hook,” explains Cameron.
“This weekend is about how the motorsport community marks Remembrance Sunday. We come here for a remembrance service and in order to justify that there’s a bit of a motor race that happens on either side,” he quips.
It’s far more than that, though. In fact if it wasn’t for the Race of Remembrance many veterans would not be able to mark the occasion at all, as Remembrance Sunday is too traumatic for them. “If I was at home I’d switch the TV off and avoid everything,” one tells me.
In the pit lane, 55 race teams and their crews gather for hymns, prayer and silence. To remember friends and family lost in noble fight. It’s clearly a very difficult moment for many veterans, but everyone having a part to play in the race and having support from the teammates and Mission Motorsport staff helps. Cameron shouting “Let’s go racing!” immediately after the service is a brilliant diversionary tactic to bring everyone back to the present.
I’m here because Cameron kindly offered me a drive alongside former rifleman Matt Stringer, 18-year army veteran Linda Noble and former Naval air controller Nick Wilson. All three have benefitted from Mission’s support after leaving the military.
Stringer was serving in Afghanistan in 2010 when he was caught up in an IED [improvised explosive device] blast which took the lives of two of his comrades and left him deaf. After being medically discharged he retrained with Mission Motorsport, which helped him find a job with a race team and then branch out on his own with a business wrapping cars for racing and the road.
Matt is the most experienced racer in car number 69, having piloted the Citroën C1 last year and competing for the fifth time this year.
Former navy man Nick Wilson left the military during the pandemic and it was thanks to Mission Motorsport’s automotive connections that he landed his first civilian job at Bentley and is now Chief of Staff at Morgan. Wilson drove a Morgan Plus Four in 2021’s Race of Remembrance.
Linda Noble joined the army in 2000 and, after an 18-year career during which she served in Gibraltar, Germany and Afghanistan, was medically discharged in 2018 with complex PTSD causing a range of mental health problems, in addition to physically debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Unable to work, while having to care for her veteran husband and look after two sons, racing provides her with an escape from a day-to-day that’s fraught with challenges.
Although she drove alongside Wilson in a Morgan last year it’s sim racing, using video games, that is Noble’s passion. Racing in weekly online endurance races on the iRacing platform she has a second life as a team manager and Twitch [a social media video channel for gamers] streamer extraordinaire.
While I can’t pretend to have faced the challenges of my team-mates, I can relate when Noble describes the benefits she gets from sim racing. During the Covid-19 lockdown I started racing online for the first time, joining a small community known as 27Racers, formed by ex-Evo and Top Gear Magazine staffers.
Our weekly races were the only social contact outside of our individual bubbles that any of us had and, genuinely, a mental health medicine. I’m hoping to translate some of what I’ve practiced in the virtual world into reality.
We are sharing our pit garage with a second Mission Motorsport-run car, a Mazda MX-5, donated some years ago by the Japanese manufacturer, raising awareness and funds for Neuroendecrine Cancer Support and Macmillan Cancer Support.
Among the drivers are former naval police officer Laurence Roke, a survivor of testicular cancer, and Mark Stevens whose neuroendocrine cancer is terminal. Having obtained a licence just weeks ago, this will quite literally be the race of his life.
Up and down the paddock are stories of people overcoming the odds thanks in no small part to the support of Mission Motorsport and the opportunities it provides.
The mission has even crossed the Atlantic, where Canada-based Operation Motorsport was formed after founder and former paratrooper Diezel Lodder first attended Race of Remembrance in 2016. This year Lodder has brought two Honda Civic Type Rs provided by the famous Skip Barber racing school and some 39 people, including 13 ex-forces beneficiaries, two of whom are driving.
“When people medically retire from the military they lose their team identity and purpose, and that’s what we aim to give them back,” says Lodder. “For one of our guys it’s the first time in four years that he’s come out of the basement on Remembrance Weekend.”
Under starter’s orders
The race format is unusual to say the least. On Saturday the lights go out at 3pm and we race into the dark. We qualified second to last, but Stringer’s experience sees our little car gradually creep up the field, helped by reliability issues with other teams.
The sun is setting as I take over and despite a powerful LED light bar being fitted to the car the circuit looks completely different as darkness descends. The braking and turning in points I’d spotted during practice vanish into the night, so it takes a while to get up to speed.
What makes it even harder to focus are the blindingly bright lights of other cars, some closing in at simply insane speed. Our one-litre Citroen is comprehensively outgunned by the Lotus Elises and Caterhams that lead the field.
Nonetheless, by the end of my 80-minute session I’ve improved my lap times significantly and am only a second or so shy of Stringer’s daytime pace. Most importantly as I return to the pitlane, the car is still in one piece.
Noble is next and has a tricky run, punctuated by long sessions behind the safety car, and her arthritis causing her great pain. Wilson completes his allocated laps having had a brush with a Mazda but escaping unscathed.
The same can’t quite be said for Stringer who heads out again to take the red and white flag that will signal the end of the first part of the race. Dicing with another C1 he fails to spot a car diving up the inside and the two make contact. He makes a detour for the pits, bent bodywork is pulled away from the front wheel and he makes it to the flag in 43rd place.
We start again at 9am after precious few hours sleep in a nearby RAF barracks, but still more rest than our pit crew who have replaced the alternator belt and front brake pads overnight. The rules state that the driver from last night needs to start in the morning so Stringer is once again in the hotseat, and we’re gradually moving up the order thanks to the trails and tribulations of others, despite the car being mysteriously down on power.
My drive is split by the 11am memorial service, 30 minutes on track before and an hour afterwards. Try as I might the C1’s power issue means that the other cars in our class now simply breeze by on the straights, so it’s just a case of nursing the car home.
Unfortunately, just 40 minutes before the chequered flag, with Nick Wilson at the helm, it looks like even that might not be possible. A rear bearing fails suddenly and Wilson watches his right rear wheel overtake him before the car spins out. Having driven to the circuit in a Morgan Super 3, the jokes about his ability to drive on three wheels come thick and fast.
Recovered to the pits, Aston Dimmock, Dave Guilfoyle, Kyle Barass and the rest of our crew manage to rebuild the car in the nick of time with parts borrowed from other teams, and we send Noble out to take the flag, coming home in 43rd place.
Up front, the race is won by Rob Boston Racing in a Lotus Elise, some 88 laps ahead of us. But as far as I’m concerned simply taking part in this incredible race is victory in itself.
To find out more about Mission Motorsport visit https://www.missionmotorsport.org/ and https://www.raceofremembrance.com/
Photo credit: Red Water Images
Related articles
- If you were interested in Nik Berg’s write-up of the 2022 Race of Remembrance, check out Nick Trott’s account of the Mission Motorsport event in 2019
- Here’s more on the work of Mission Motorsport
- This summer, Iron Dames became the first all-female driver line-up to take a class win at the 24 Hours of Spa
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