ABOUT RAINDANCE DRAG RACING

The Raindance team began life early in 1995, starting with the construction of a new race car. The car was built with a view to utilise as many components as possible from a previous car which was destroyed in 1993 at Santa Pod during the European Finals meeting.

The new car was built around a base of a MkV Ford Cortina 2-door model –a rare item in itself these days. This car was completed after around 13 months worth of spare time labour and was finished in Diamond white paint complete with the original factory fitted black vinyl roof. The Raindance car had its debut outing in competition at Santa Pod’s Easter Thunderball event of 1996 with a good, solid performance . The Cortina subsequently ran in the Super ET class, where, after the inevitable new car bugs were ironed out, it began to have a significant impact upon the Super ET class.

The Cortina was the subject of a three page feature in the Southern Evening and Bournemouth Evening Echo newspapers who treated the general public to a glimpse of the exiting world of drag racing.

After a couple of seasons which included event wins and high placings in championships, the Super ET class was dropped in the UK as a result of re-structuring many classes by the organising authorities. For the Raindance team, the upshot of this was that the super ET class was effectively split in half, as the faster half of the Super ET class would fit quite nicely into the new Pro ET classification, leaving the remainder to compete in the also new Sportsman ET class.

The Raindance Cortina competed for a couple more seasons in the Pro ET class securing more event wins and enjoying the resultant good placings in championship tables. Sadly, though a championship win seemed a possibility on more than one occasion, financial and time restrictions prevented the Raindance team from competing at all the scheduled events –an essential component of any championship challenge.

With several seasons racing under its belt, the Raindance Cortina was deemed ripe for a little freshening and updating and was put into the workshop at the end of the 2000 season. The projected update predictably snowballed into a complete rebuild, leaving almost no part untouched in the search for improvement. As a consequence, the car was sidelined for the 2001 racing season and the largest part of the 2002 season –although the Raindance Cortina did emerge towards the end of this season to complete a couple of events satisfactorily.

The Raindance team completed a limited schedule in 2003 –mainly due to work commitments and has been taking a sabbatical in the 2004/5 seasons due to other non racing circumstances.

The unsung heroes of any team are the crew, who are an essential part of the racing effort and without which racing would be virtually impossible. The Raindance team is no exception and has been graced with the presence of a number of crewchiefs since Raindance began more than a decade ago. The biggest single factor in the departure of the team’s crewchiefs seems to be that Raindance crew appear to get bitten very hard by the racing bug, to the degree that crewchiefs want to race their own car. This means that the Pro ET ranks have gained one or two new teams over this period who have made their own mark on the sport.

The Raindance team intends to compete with consistency and reliability with a road legal Racecar in successively higher categories. To this end the team is always on the lookout for financial and product sponsorship opportunities. This could well prove to be an increasingly more cost effective method of advertising (both regionally and nationally) as the car and the sport in general become more well known in motoring and more mainstream circles.

In addition the team intends to attend as many car shows and other functions as schedules and funds permit with a view to maximising exposure of both the team and its backers.

In this way, the Raindance team can promote a down-to-earth but serious image –thereby inspiring car enthusiasts in all disciplines to follow suit and keep motorsport as popular in this century as it has been in the last.