He is already ploughing his own successful furrow in the motorsport world with a karting career that is going from strength-to-strength, but Jay Goodwin has been given a glimpse of life at the very top from a leading F1 legend – a legend in BriSCA F1 stock cars, that is.
Jay is one of the foremost karters in Britain having finished a superb sixth in the Mini Max class of the Lewis Hamilton and Bernie Ecclestone-backed Formula Kart Stars (FKS) Championship in 2010, and next year he will step up to the more powerful and hotly-contested Junior Max level with Strawberry Racing. That might mean he is treading a somewhat different path, but stock cars are what the highly-rated young Sale-based hotshot has been brought up with.
“It’s a bit of a tradition in my family, really,” the Ashton-upon-Mersey ace explained. “My dad used to race them, and now my older brother races them. We’ve always been associated with stock cars one way or another, and now we sponsor the world champion Andy Smith and his brother Stuart Smith Jnr.”
That sponsorship comes via the Go Goodwins coach company run by Jay’s father, Geoff, and extends back to 1996. Lauding Andy Smith’s attention-to-detail as second-to-none, Goodwin Snr palpably remains every bit as passionate about the sport as he ever was.
“I used to go along to help mechanic at Belle Vue in Manchester when I was eight or nine-years-old,” he recounted. “There were 30,000-odd spectators there, and I absolutely loved it. I raced BriSCA (British Stock Car Association) F1 in the 1980s and from 1994 until 1996, when the business just got too busy – but now my eldest son Wesley is starting to race properly, too. The cars have 600bhp and are just unbelievable! It is a contact sport and it can be dangerous sometimes as can any form of motorsport, but it’s good fun and there’s always a great family atmosphere.”
Admitting that he might allow 13-year-old Jay to have a go in one of the fearsomely-powerful cars in a year’s time or so, Geoff took an ex-Andy Smith World Finals-winning model now raced by Wesley along to the penultimate FKS meeting of 2010 at Three Sisters near Wigan.
Something so completely different and hitherto unencountered for the majority of Jay’s rivals – although the father of one of his fellow competitors was once a world champion in hot-rods – it certainly elicited plenty of interest, and Geoff mused of his youngest son that were he to give the discipline a go one day, even if just for fun, he would probably ‘love it...and I think he’d make a great little stock car driver, too...”
BriSCA caught the public’s attention rather more through the recent BBC documentary ‘Gears and Tears’, with races all over Britain from Coventry, Birmingham and Northampton to Kings Lynn, Scunthorpe and even Knockhill, always around short 400-metre ovals. The first-ever stock car race in the country took place at the New Cross Stadium in London on Good Friday in 1954 – and over the subsequent half-century or so, Andy Smith has become one its most successful and crowned practitioners.
“I was born into it, really,” reflected the five-time world champion, an ever-present fixture at the pinnacle of the sport for the past decade-and-a-half. “My father raced stock cars right back in the 1960s, and I started out as a child in the junior division when I was 11-years-old before progressing on to the top F1 division in 1994.
“I’ve been lucky enough to win the world championship five times. I unexpectedly won it in my first year, actually, but I was still relatively young at just 21, and it was probably a bit too soon. There was a real weight of expectation upon my shoulders after that, and I hadn’t been in the sport long enough to be able to deal with it. There was a long barren spell until 2006, and then I won again in 2008, 2009 and 2010. A hat-trick of world championships is quite a rarity, so to win it this year for the third time on the trot was a brilliant achievement and very special.
“There’s a lot of history behind stock car racing, and it’s quite a big racing scene. The thing that sets it apart from more established forms of motorsport and draws people in, I feel, is that it’s very much a Saturday night sport. That means the ordinary working man can still go to work on a Saturday and enjoy his motorsport on Saturday evening – it doesn’t encroach upon the working week like conventional types of motorsport do.
“It’s contact racing, which means you can take a bit of aggression out – but it isn’t banger racing, which some people who don’t know much about it associate it with. It’s a million miles away from that in terms of the specification of the cars, completely different – but the nature of the sport means it can be spectacular.
“You can have up to 35 cars on-track around a quarter-mile oval and there’s a structured handicap system whereby the fastest drivers start at the rear of the field, which creates a spectacle as they try to fight their way through over the course of a five or six-minute race. That’s the real appeal for the fans – the fact that stock car racing stands on its own as a pure spectator sport. It’s just pure entertainment.”
To learn more about BriSCA racing, please see: .brisca.com/
