There are three or four championships being run at Gurston Down in addition to those that are invited. Invited championships are visitors and use the Gurston venue but manage their own championship to their own rules, these include the British Hillclimb Championship, Ferarri,, Bugatti, Triumph and the Connaught Championships
Gurston Downs Championships are
Gurston Down Championship which comprises
- Overall Championship
- Class awards
Top Ten Runoff Championship
and we’re trialing the Performance and Conditions Adjusted Championship PaCAC as an unofficial competition in 2026
In order to be included in the Gurston Championship, Top Ten Runoff and PaCAC, the competitors must be registered in the championship for their nominated class of competition.
Gurston Overall and Class Championship
This is the main competition at Gurston Down. Each car is competing in a class of cars. Each class has a best time achieved in the last few years. Each competitors run is compared against that best time achieve in all the rounds up to , but excluding the current one back two prior competitive years. If the competitor achieves that time, they get 20 points, if they are a second slower they are awareded 19 points, likewise if they exceed it by a second they are awarded 21 points.
Each competitors best pair of rounds from the Sunday in on the first competitive weekend of the year and last weekend of the year are doubled – only one days point are doubled if they compete in both
This equalises achievement. Competitors within a class are awarded end of event trophies, and end of season trophies based on those that get the best points score across the season.
All the competitors are also tallied into the Gurston Overall Championship..
Top Ten RunOff
The twelve fastest runners of the day that are registered in the Gurston Championships and TopTen RunOff are invited to run once more at the end of the day. From that one run, the fastest runner is awarded 10 points, next 9 points, all the way to 1 point for 10th place, no points are awarded for 11th and 12th. The points are tallied over the season, each competitors top 7 scores are counted towards the championship, As with the main championship their best score from either the Sunday in the First and last weekend of competition is doubled.
Performance and Condition Adjusted Championship (PaCAC)
We are trialing a scoring system which is intended to equalise performance of cars and competitors abilities, promoting ongoing improvement. See the announcement here
The Performance and Conditions Adjusted Championship, PaCAC, is being trialled and trophies are being awarded at events and end of year.
Why?
There are a few challenges we see many forms of motorsport and specifically at Gurston Down;
- not all cars can be competitive
- to make more cars competitive we introduce more classes
- too many classes means too few cars per class, an average of less than 5 cars per class
- The structure of points works against competing on days where there are non-perfect conditions (time based points)
We have up to 150 competitors at our events; we also have over 25 classes in Gurston (and we keep adding more) and 10 invited championships at an event; that means an average of 5 competitors per class, some classes have just 1 or 2 competitors. More and more classes are introduced to allow more types of car (and competitors) to be competitive, but competitive against fewer and fewer competitors in their class. If a scoring system can be devised that allows competitors to be competitive against one-another then the the competition becomes ever competitor and specific cars
The other issue we have with the current scoring system is that points are awarded based on time achieved; this means that on a wet or otherwise slow day competitors are less likely to compete, some even leave the event. The scoring system should look to equalise points between track conditions – like a scoring system that awards points for positions does (e.g. 1st place is awarded 10 points then 7, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1)
What are we trialling?
We have looked at a number of different options, all competitions are compromises and imperfect, we have simulated this using last years data.
- Every driver has a personal target time for each round – this is based on a blend of the best time you have achieved in the current year and the class target time
- All drivers are in a class, all the classes are assigned to a class”group”, based on three groups, 1.car on road tyres, 2. cars allowed to use slicks and 3. cars allowed to have wings and slicks.
- We then adjust the personal target times after everyone has had their run:
- for the classes that have sufficient number of run-times we look to see how quickly they went on their round compared to the target time. We take the best time from each class and average those to create a group adjustment
- The target time for each competitor is adjusted by the appropriate class-group adjustment; this gives us a conditions adjusted target time
- We then determine how everyone performed relative to this conditions adjusted target time and award 20points for achieving it and 1 point more for a second under, 1 point less for a second slower etc
After every round target times are recalculated.
No double points are allocated in this competition. Also your best score is discarded and only the next best 13 are considered for the championship (same number of total events as the other championships)
Current Standings
Scores for all championships are available here (this is updated shortly after each round/event)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VsXNHeJcOSmDzBIZlfM3JSp99LGzAfe56VuJQk5gZCE/edit?usp=sharing