A biofuelled Aston Martin winning a major-league motorsport event in Britain? My Lord! Well, actually, there’s one of those involved as well, and he’s a politician to boot. Lord Paul Drayson is the United Kingdom’s Minister of Defence Procurement, responsible for spending billions of pounds each year on updating Britain’s armed forces. Unlike many of our mob, he made most of his money before taking up politics.
When he sold his biotech group, Powderject, for £542-million three years ago, Drayson decided to seek new challenges, and kicked off two new careers — politics and racing motor cars. Both seem to be working out rather well. He’s streamlined the Ministry of Defence, using principles he learnt in the business world, and last weekend he and his co-driver, Jonny Cokker, won the most recent round of the British GT championship at Snetterton in their Aston Martin DBRS9.
The winning car, based on the DB9 road car, has undergone several modifications to make it suitable for racing on bio-ethanol fuel. The same supercharged six-litre V12 engine provides the grunt, but the fuelling system has been revised, the ECU recalibrated for biofuel and the suspension upgraded to cope with the rigours of the racetrack.
Add a sequential racing gearbox and lightweight composite bodywork, and you have the makings of a race winner, as proven last week when the biofuelled car won — the first big win ever for a green racer in the UK.
Drayson caused much muttering in the British press when he was granted his peerage in 2004, after he had donated an alleged million pounds to the Labour Party. A year later he took up his Cabinet post and, so far, he’s done a pretty good job.
In South African terms, the British saga could be considered akin to Chippy Shaik and Jacob Zuma entering and winning a national championship race in a 1958 GSM Dart running on Union Spirits (remember the fuel brewed from sugar cane in the 1960s?). Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.