Founded in the year nineteen twenty-four February 1980

many long articles about them appearing in the motoring
papers, written for him by Dennis May when he was
too busy to do them himself. This detailed analysis pi
his Bentleys and Rovers, up to his last Rover 3500, was
another feature of Mays’ interest in good cars. That this
tall, unchanging enthusiast, with the deep, even gruff,
voice, who never uttered unnecessary platitudes but
who knew absolutely what it was all about, will never
again be seen is almost impossible to contemplate. All
we can do now is to recapture the flavour of his busy,
dedicated life by reading the many hooks in. which he
figures, and especially “Split Seconds”, ghosted for this
great personality by Dennis May, with a foreword by C.
A. N. May.
At the time of his death, Mays was Director of
Racing for the Owen Organisation. Chairman and
Managing Director of Raymond Mays and Partners Ltd..
Managing Director of T. W. Mays and Sous Ltd. and
Chairman of Mays Chemical Manure Co. Ltd. — W.B.
VETERAN
EDWARDIAN VINTAGE
A SECTION DEVOTED TO
OLD-CAR MATTERS
Why Do They Do It?
IT IS fitting that various advocates of Historic Car Racing,
such as Michael Bowler and our Clive Richardson and
Denis Jenkinson, have been writing about the absolute
necessity of being able to decide, before such races
escalate, which cars are eligible because they are original
or at least decently historically authentic, and which
are dismal fakes, the result of too many rebuilds, if not
actually entirely new replicas of old racing cars.
I do not envy anyone the task of sorting-out this
vexed situation, even less he who has to turn away
undesirable entries, perhaps in the Paddock after
scrutineering. But sorted out it must be! The situation
seems to revolve round why people go in for vintage
and historic racing. Is it for the joy of driving old and
individualistic machinery in competition? Or is it to
earn money from sponsors, gain some fame and glory
in a growing section of motor racing, or to increase the
already high value of eligible pre-1961 cars? A bit of
everything, of course.
May I suggest that, among the VSCC at least, there
arc those who like to race in the older motor cars because
this is nostalgic for them and they like to recapture to
some degree an idea of what it was like in racing for
drivers they admired, perhaps in their first youthful
flush of enthusiasm for the Sport? This may seem farfetched,
but I can only remark that 1 can think of one
driver who, as he drives out of the Paddock at a vintage
race meeting, sees, I am sure, not Silverstone or Oulton
Park, but Brooklands and Donington of before the war.
And may I make so bold as to suggest that if Kenneth
Neve does not go so far as to think he is F. T. Burgess
coming down Bray Hill when he conducts his 1914 TT
Humber in a VSCC contest, at least he is glad to be in a
very original pre-WW1 racing motor car, on the correct
size tyres, so that he is enabled to know very closely what
it was like to race such a car when it was new?
It seems to me that those who like emulating the
drivers of old will want their cars to be decently original.
If you stiffen-up a chassis, change from cable to hydraulic
brakes, alter the weight distribution, and especially if
you run on tyres oversize from those fitted originally,
and on modern-type shock-absorbers, etc. the difference
in “feel” of a car so modified will be quite appreciable.
No longer would it be honest to say of a great driver of
the past who used it, that, having raced it today, you now
know how he tell, can appreciate his skill for example,
or perhaps that you “don’t know how he did it, on those
thin tyres and ineffective ‘shockers’, on that circuit. ...”I
would have thought that a good deal, if not the whole,
point of racing a vintage car, or an historic car for that
matter, would be to try to re-enact, to recapture, a pretty
big slice of what it used to be like; the nostalgia, in fact.
But once it is simply a matter of trying to win, most of the
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