[John Turner]

In itself, the Guards Trophy does not exclude all cars over 2 litres. It has something like 11 classes, many of which may not have raced together in period or indeed in the original Guards Trophy at all. Class D allows 'all standard & Competition GT cars over 4000cc'. This is the class in which Shaun Lynn ran his GT40 at the Autosport 3 hours. I'd love to see more of the early GT cars like this - 250LMs, 904s & Lola Mk 6, but are you now saying there should be yet another class that allows what were as I understand it, early Group 7 CanAm cars - M1, T160 & T70 spyder, because you are turning it into even more of a catchall. And don't these cars having outings elsewhere (Classic, Revival, etc). Don't get me wrong; I love the cars, but how truly representative of the original Guards Trophy are all these classes, even when you have excluded the invitation cars?

The fact is that the HSCC has created a successful series based loosely on the old Guard races. All this talk about what ran in period (but, let's be clear, historically not necessarily together) is a bit of a red herring. This is the current Guards series adapted specifically by HSCC to cater for as many cars as is practically sensible and has proved a successful formula. In fact so much so that, as I have said before, I'm sure that if say 50+ cars were regularly to sign up, then the grids could be split into two. If it was marginal on numbers, perhaps you could add a Gp 7 class up to say 1966, but surely they would go in the field that contained the B8s, not their contemporaries.