Autosport International 2002 with the SRCC Sports2000 club

We have just returned from four days at the Autosport show in Birmingham, UK. It was very well attended with lots of expensive machinery on show. Many celebrities from the motorsport world were in attendance including Nigel Mansell and David Coultard.

We shared a stand with the SRCC club to display our new Van Diemen sports 2000, it was a Pinto engined one but a Duratec Ford engine was on the stand fitted to a 1985 Tiga chassis (pictures in photo Gallery)

There was a huge amount of interest in both car and engine and over the four days we think at least ten new drivers will appear in the series next year. Most of these new people either have cars or are purchasing second hand cars from the series, this will mean there will be few cars available if any to purchase for next season. The knock on effect will be a shortage of second hand cars and a ready market for any that are available which may entice some existing owners to upgrade to new cars.

The greatest excitement for us was a visit from the legendary American guru Carroll Smith of Prepare to Win/Drive to Win fame. Carroll was visiting the show and he came over to see us and look at the Van Diemen. "A lot of mechanical Grip", was his view on the car and he particularly liked the front roll bar and springing set up. As we are now likely to have two cars in the USA this year he suggested a driver who might be available for one of them, we already have a driver for the other and I hope to be able to announce these two before long. Carroll was a fantastic gentleman and spent some time looking over the car and advising on set-up.

So to sum up for now it looks like we will have four new cars out in the UK, three pinto and one Duratec, this along with the two existing cars driven by Mike Turner and Rupert Russell will make a significant contribution to the grid. I expect a Van Diemen to win both the pinto Championship and the Pro series.

The Pro series will if may guess is correct include Rupert Russell and he will prove a hard act to beat as he now at last seems to have got to grips with his Van Diemen. It may be of interest to our US friends that he has retained the original front suspension that failed to get sorted in the US and this is the original 1994 car that came back from California.

Don't forget to check out the pictures in the gallery and keep looking in as we are testing the new car at Silverstone on Friday 18 January, hopefully we will get a good day and have time to change onto the Quantum dampers. Paddy Murphy of Quantum will be in attendance if it doesn't rain.