Charlie Lower (#21) and Marc Jones (#2), who finished second and fourth in the Caterham Motorsport 270R Championship, will be racing at Bushy Park next month
The biggest-ever single shipment of racing cars from the UK to Barbados will leave Portsmouth on Sunday (October 29) on the Geest Line freighter Baltic Klipper. Among the nearly 30 cars on board are those campaigned by six of the top 10 finishers in the 2023 Mission Motorsport Caterham Seven 270R Championship, who are set to light up Bushy Park Barbados next month.
The Caterham Caribbean Cup, dubbed ‘CCC23’ (November 25/26) will be organised by Bushy Park Motorsports Inc (BPMSI) augmented by a team from Caterham Motorsport. This non-championship event, which is supported by Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc (BTMI), will round off Caterham’s 50th Anniversary year and complete Bushy Park’s own competition season.
With 10 race wins and a further 16 podium finishes between them on some of Britain’s most famous racetracks, 270R Championship runner-up Charlie Lower, David Rooke, Marc Jones and Rrutuj Patki are looking forward to bringing Caterham’s special brand of slip-streaming wheel-to-wheel racing to the Caribbean for the first time.
Run by Team Hardline, Lower was in the running for this year’s 270R title right up to the final round at Donington Park in September, but a broken gear lever in the first of the weekend’s three races on Saturday set him back. Two impressive charges from the back of the 30-car grid in the remaining two events, failing to finish in one then claiming second place and fastest lap in the other, still left him nine points short of Championship-winner Freddie Chiddicks, despite winning eight of the 21 races.
Although he lost out on this year’s title, he was already a Caterham Champion, having won an Academy title in 2021. The following year, he progressed to the Roadsport Championship, the second step on the Caterham ladder, and finished second with six wins and five further podium places. Before switching to circuit racing, he had been competing since age 14, winning Autocross titles in a modified classic Mini.
Roughly half of the Caterhams will be shared by two drivers over the weekend, when there will be four 20-minute Sprint Races for each category – Seven 270R, Seven 310R and Seven 420R – with the drivers taking two races each, then two one-hour Enduros at the end of each day, Saturday’s under floodlights, with a mandatory pitstop for a driver changeover. Lower will be sharing his car with his brother Zach.
Rooke finished third after a consistent campaign, which included three podium finishes in the second half of the season at Silverstone, Thruxton and Snetterton; he had also previously won a Caterham title, as the inaugural Roadsports Champion in the innovative Three Nations Cup introduced in 2022. For Bushy Park, he shares the car with Hardline team-mate Louise Deason.
Jones failed to score only once during the season on his way to fourth place and was the winner of the last of the three races in the Donington Park final, when he was the highest points-scorer of the day, having also finished second in Saturday’s opening race; he will be sharing with Joe Priday. Academy Champion last year, Patki was the only driver in the top 10 to score in all 21 races, winning the second race in the penultimate meeting of the year at Snetterton; he shares with Toby Ballard.
The Radical Barbados Trophy will complete the weekend’s timetable. The region’s own one-make category for the Suzuki-powered Radical SR3s will have practice and qualifying sessions, plus three races; although this is a non-championship event, competitors from Jamaica and T&T are confirmed to participate.
(PR)