On 29th May 2017 the Legend #114 team headed to Hednesford for a Bank Holiday Monday race with some enthusiasm, but the day was to end in disaster and put Damian and the team out of action for a year. I will explain all, but first a little background on the events leading up to both this race and the season as a whole.
Damian bought his new car late last year, but it was only new in the sense it was new to him, the car is actually 13 years old and had seen quite a bit of action already. This is often the case with Legends cars, as brand new cars are quite expensive so buying second-hand and refurbishing them is the normal method of getting into Legends racing.
Damian was never happy with the way the car handled. It had a buckled cross-member behind the seat he couldn’t straighten and he felt the frame overall was slightly out of shape. He complained about the handling right from the off, even though he’d had some decent results, 3 heat wins out of 4 at the last 2 races, and was 4th in the points chart. He felt the car was holding him back in it’s present condition and so took the brave, and expensive, decision to buy a new chassis from Derek Hales, the UK agent for Legends cars. At nearly £3,000 this was some risk Damian was taking, as the new chassis is / was only slightly different from the old one and not guaranteed to make as much difference to his performance as he might hope.
Damian spent 2 weeks re-building the car into the new chassis (everything had to be taken off the old chassis and reassembled onto the new one). He also spent considerable time fine tuning the suspension and together with the new chassis had splashed out on a set of scales and professional measuring equipment so he could work towards the perfect setup. On the Saturday before the race at Hednesford he took the car to Arena Essex for a test, and was delighted with how it handled, describing it as night and day different from the old chassis.
So heading towards Hednesford on the Bank Holiday Monday we were full of hope Damian could finally realise the potential he’d already shown this season and come away with perhaps his first major trophy of 2017. This race was for the National Championship and was to be decided on drawn and reversed grids, so it was all up for grabs by whoever could put in the best performance on the day.
Unfortunately the day was marred by bad weather, it was raining lightly when we got there and got worse as the day went on. In the 1st heat Damian started 24th out of 25 and finished 15th. In the 2nd heat, with the grid reversed, he started 2nd and finished 3rd. This put him about 8th on the grid for the Final, but with #161 Dan Holden and #21 Sean Smith (who’d won both heats) at the front of the grid a win now looked impossible, and his hopes were further dashed when he spun on the very first lap and found himself near the back.
The conditions were very slippery, and Damian’s priority now was simply to get the car home in one piece and pick up whatever points he could. In heat #1 Damian had bumped wheels with #21 Sean Smith, a driver with a reputation for being talented (he also competes on the circuits) but also dirty. In the Final Damian bumped wheels with him again, and Smith, deciding this was deliberate, took “revenge” by driving Damian deliberately into the wall.
Now to put this in context. The track was wet, cars bumping into each other was always going to happen. Damian doesn’t even recall the incident in heat #1 and was surprised when the stewards mentioned it to him after the race. He thinks he might have made contact with someone, but wasn’t sure who, and it certainly wasn’t deliberate. In the Final Damian was sticking to the wall specifically to keep out of trouble, and on lap 12 when #21 Smith tried to squeeze past on the outside he actually steered into the track to give him room, but the slippery conditions caused his backend to move out rather than his frontend to move in, and wheels bumped again. Entirely accidental, but Smith, presumably judging others by his own low standards, decided this was deliberate and felt wilfully endangering the life of a fellow driver by forcing him into a head-on collision with a steel and concrete wall as an “OK” response.
Fortunately it was only the new £3,000 chassis that was destroyed, and not Damian. The race was red-flagged and Damian was able to get himself out of his car. However, seeing the damage to the car, and knowing what it’d cost him and how much racing means to him, he saw red and sprinted across the track to confront Smith who was parked in the in-field, having driven Damian at such speed into the wall he couldn’t avoid hitting it himself and had torn his front end off. A very unsavoury altercation then took place, the upshot of which is that Damian has been banned for 12 months for attacking another driver, and, we believe, Smith has also been banned for his unjustified retaliation.
And so ends Damian’s adventure in Oval Track Legends for another year. He’s determined to come back, re-build the car and re-build his reputation, but we won’t be seeing Damian on the track till this time next year. Personally I think he’s embarrassed by the whole situation and would rather forget it, but this website was built to document Damian’s racing career, and that means the bad stuff as well as the good.
There are many things I could say about Smith at this point, but all Legends drivers are judged by the conduct of their teams as well as themselves, and I won’t bring Damian into any further disrepute. I do however have video of the incident, up to the point of the crash (after that Damian’s mother and I were running to the pits to see if he was OK!). Damian feels the video has been seen by everyone that needs to see it, but if other Legends drivers are in any doubt about the kind of person Smith is I will make it available on request.