by John Brown, Gurston Down commentator
2026 at Gurston Down – The End is Nigh
The 2026 Turbo Dynamics Gurston Down Championship and the Online Cleaning Technologies Top Ten Challenge reach their conclusion on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th August with action beginning each day at 0830 with practice.
On Saturday we will also have competitors from the BOC Rally Car Championship, the BOC New Barn Land Rover Interclub Championship, the BOC Fassi Classic Speed Championship, the Downton Motor Club Speed Championship, the Gilbern Owners Club and the TR Register Triumph Speed Championship.
On Sunday, while the 3 BOC Championships are not with us we do have the Bert Hadley Memorial Championship for Austin 7s, the Morgan Sports Car Club Techniques Speed Championship and the Superperformance Ferrari Hillclimb Championship.
A full entry on each day with over 140 competitors who will get 2 practice runs, 2 timed runs and, for the fastest 12 Championship contenders, a run-off to end the day.
The Top Ten Challenge was decided at the last meeting when the run-off on the Sunday was cancelled when the meeting was abandoned, meaning that no points could be scored. This reduced the number of scoring rounds to the best 6 out of 9 and with 6 wins, including 1 at the double points round in April Steve Holland can not be beaten and he has won the Top Ten Challenge for the second time in 4 years, this time in his Force TA with the same Suzuki engine that was in the Caterham he used to win the title back in 2023.
Steve Holland (Force TA) – photo by Vince Feeney
Steve has 70 points including doubling while he is followed by a tight battle between Ben Bonfield (52), Nigel Pitt (51) and Mark Crookall (50), but while Ben (16) and Mark (18) score well when their Round 2 scores are doubled, Nigel (6) actually drops that doubled score and so a good result for him on Sunday could turn that 2nd to 4th place battle on its head.
While we have a Challenge winner it is still all to play for in the Championship with 4 rounds still to come this weekend. If these are all completed then a competitor’s best 14 scores out of 20 will count towards their total. In addition to that there are 4 rounds from which the best 2 scores will be doubled, these being rounds 3 and 4 (May) and the final 2 rounds on Sunday (19 and 20).
So there will be some frantic calculations going on once all the runs have been completed to calculate the final positions.
Two men have been the stars of the Championship so far, each of them bettering their class target time on 6 occasions this season – Karl Stevens in his Ford Escort and Tim Pitfield in his DJ Firecat while class targets have also been bettered 4 times by Stepehen Snell (Ralt RT35), thrice by Luke Trotman (Mallock), twice by Jim Herbert (Mitsubishi), Ben Rolls (Mallock), Charles Jones (Mallock) and Steve Holland (Force TA) and once by Richard Morton (Mazda MX5) and Graham Beale (Ginetta G33).
Karl Stevens (Ford Escort Mk2) – photo by Vince Feeney
Tim Pitfield (DJ Firecat) – photo by Matt Willis
There were no targets beaten at all over the last 4 rounds at the beginning of August and as we get towards the end of the season it may be that targets are getting harder to beat as they get lower and lower, so a couple of fast runs could decide the winner.
The top 6 after 16 rounds are Stevens, Pitfield, Holland, Snell, John Davey (MG Midget) and Russell Davies (Honda Civic), the last two having not got below their class target but been consistently close to it.
The destination of the championship could well depend on the doubled up scores on Sunday, as we saw last year when Clive Stangle came through to take the title with a class record time on his last run of the year and it is good to see Clive and wife Jenny back with us this weekend, though they are running in the modified 4WD class rather than the road-going section.
As well as the overall Championship there is a championship trophy for each of the classes and there will be some battles there as well, none more so than in the class for Racing Cars between 601cc and 1100cc where Ben Bonfield and Mark Crookall are separated by just 0.06 across their best 14 scores (without any doubling) after the first 16 rounds with Mark in the lead.
Another class where there has been a close scrap all season is the Racing Cars up to 600cc class where brother Calum and Ewan Kemp have shared the wins across the 14 rounds they have competed in with Euan winning 8 times and Calum 6 times.
So lots of action to look forward to on Bank Holiday weekend and hopefully we will continue to have some sunshine though a few showers would help to clean the track and dampen the verges and protect us from the problems that occurred at the beginning of the month.