Sidecar Revival

Cadwell Park

7th & 8th August 2021

The PistonClick team have spectated and photographed the Sidecar Revival at Cadwell Park for a few good years now. It’s one of those events that we make a point of attending, and by the size of the crowds that turned up for this two day celebration of three wheel mayhem, we weren’t the only fans of this crazy motorsport.

Crazy, mayhem those are strong words and not lightly used to describe this form of motorsports.

Why crazy? Well if you haven’t been to see sidecars racing in anger you should, and take in the amazing skills of the passengers who have to be just a little bit crazy to hang out of these machines just millimetres from the track.

Now the word "passenger" doesn’t fit well with me as there is no way on this planet that the person in the sidecar is a passenger.

From various parts of the web the loose definition of a passenger is: a person who is travelling from one place to another in a car, bus, train, ship, airplane, etc and who is not driving or working on it.

From a spectator's viewpoint the "passenger" is so “working it”. To me they are a co-drivers. The amount of effort that they put into getting these machines to go round a track quickly is amazing.

Don’t get me wrong, without a good driver you aren’t going anywhere, but combine the two and the podium awaits for a crew in harmony.

The two crews that stood out for me in the Molson Group British Sidecar Championship were obviously the Birchalls, Ben and Tom, racing the Haith Honda.

Dominant in the class, I’ve watched them race on roads in the Isle of Man TT, Oliver’s Mount and tracks throughout the UK.

Coming into this meeting the brothers had maximum points and were looking good to continue their winning streak. Race one was as planned with the Birchalls taking the win by five seconds, but race two and three were not going to go the brothers' way.

The second crew I was looking out for was Todd Ellis and Emmanuelle Clement.

I last saw them at the World Super Bike meeting at Donington Park where they had teamed up after Ellis's regular passenger, Charlie Richardson couldn’t make the Le Mans round.

They were superb at Donington and I had high hopes of some close racing at Cadwell.

For race two I picked the Gooseneck to watch the race, but a quick rain shower put paid to it, catching out the race leaders. The Birchalls, Todd Ellis and Emmanuelle Clement couldn’t make the corner and took to the slip road and grass.

All hell broke out behind them as the rest of the pack were also struggling for grip on this tricky part of the track. Tommy Philp and Tom Bryant ended up going straight into the barriers at some considerable speed, resulting in a red flag.

Tommy was injured baldly and needed to be airlifted to hospital. Our thoughts are with him and I hope he makes a quick recovery.

I picked Hall bends for the re-run and all looked good for the Birchalls, but Ellis and Clement had other ideas, taking the lead in the latter part of the race. The brothers didn’t want to relinquish their unbeaten record in the series and pushed hard but looked to be struggling for grip.

They weren't the only ones having problems on this part of the track. Clarke and Ensor in #17 had a bit of a moment, great recovery by Peter Ensor to stay in the vehicle. 

Race three was more of the same, again in tricky race conditions. Ellis and Clement took the win with the Birchalls second increasing their lead in the championships.

Blackstock and Rosney took the last podium place. The Birchalls are now on 215 championship points with #95 Blackstock on 113 and #60 Holland on 95 and in third place. 

There wasn’t just three wheel action at the meeting. There was a hint of Castrol R in the air with the Blue Haze GP & GPF 2-Strokes and DFDS Yamaha Past Masters slotting in between the sidecar races. 

#117 Stuart Hall on his Yamaha TZ250 was dominant in the Blue Haze class, taking four wins from the four races. 

In the Yamaha past masters #24 Scott Carson and #13 Doug Edmondson would share the honours with two wins apiece.

All this two wheel action was all well and good, and I do like two stroke racing. Nothing else sounds like it, but we had come to see the sidecars.

There was the latest kit on show, F1 and F2, British Historic Bears as well as the classic four stroke machines of the Camathias Cup Classic Series. 

The Cup is named after Florian Camathias who was a professional Grand Prix and Sidecar racer who sadly died in a sidecar crash at Brands Hatch in 1965 - remembered here in this race series.

The #9 BMW of Clarke and Visscher took both race wins in the Camathias Cup.

Our last set of photos is of #54 Driver Mick Alton and Passenger (Co - Driver) Keith Brotherton and the incident at the Gooseneck.

Now as I discussed earlier there was a nasty accident with Tommy Philp and Tom Bryant. I didn’t and will not post pictures of people being seriously hurt in motorsport.

However, this sequence is fair game as although it looks horrific and wasn’t pleasant to watch, the guys were fine once Keith and the marshals had extracted Mick from the car.

As the guys were being recovered, waving to the cheering crowd, I turned to my shooting buddy and commented on the crash. His reply was "they are used to that, there is a kangaroo sticker on that car, it's natural habitat is upside down"!

So that concludes our visit to the Sidecar Revival. Didn’t it used to be called the International Sidecar Revival? I suppose once we have beaten COVID the International element might return to the title.

Sidecars, crazy mayhem with a big, big dollop of great racing.

Put it in your diary for next year - we have.

Thanks to Graeme Taylor Images and RPW Photography for helping out with this report and its good to see spectator photographers still using wet film.