FEATURE : KEITH PICKERING
Hustling the Britannia along
Rule Britannia
Despite an unfashionable car and only modest experience , Keith Pickering is making his mark in Formula Junior . Paul Lawrence found out more .
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Let ’ s be honest , the Britannia Formula Junior is not of the category ’ s most sought-after cars , but Keith Pickering has got his working well and the 1960 rear-engined car finished runner-up in the 2020 championship to Cam Jackson ’ s Brabham . Keith , now aged 43 and from Romsey in Hampshire , lays the blame for his current racing programme squarely at the feet of Stuart Roach and it is hard to disagree . Despite a fairly torrid time to begin with , it all came together last year as Keith pedalled the Britannia marque further up the order than it has
probably even been before .
The Pickering weakness for fast cars goes back to his late teenage years when , as an eager 18-year-old , he worked for the Tangent Motorsport Caterham team for a year in 1995 before getting what he describes as a proper job .
“ I did a little rallying as a navigator for my brother in a Ford Escort Mk2 in the early 2000s and was quality manager for McLaren Automotive for 11 years . I came back to racing with a lotus Elise about 10 years ago with MSVR in the Track Day Trophy . I raced that for a while and then had a Ginetta G20 until the children came along .
“ Stuart Roach , who has been a friend for 20 years and our wives work together , offered me his Alexis Mk3 Formula Junior for the Silverstone Classic in 2018 . I didn ’ t fit in the car and I didn ’ t do any testing . I didn ’ t start the first race when I thought the head gasket had blown but it was just the temperature gauge reading high .
“ But I finished the second race and made up a few places and handed the car back to Stuart in one piece . It had won at Goodwood first time out with Stuart and its second race was with me at Silverstone and it didn ’ t do quite as well . It was a baptism of fire as I ’ d never raced a single-seater before and I thought that was my racing career over again .”
But Stuart had other plans and said they were going to Spa in September and Keith could borrow the Alexis again . He didn ’ t take too much persuading but needed to fit better in the car . “ Spa in a single-seater just had to be done so I said okay . We did everything we could to get me lower in the car , but it just wasn ’ t going to happen , so I started looking out for my own car !
“ I bought the Britannia which was kind of ready to go . It needed a little bit of work so I stripped it in a couple of weeks holiday and put an entry in for Spa . We took the car out there and it failed on the first lap of the race . It had a really bad misfire in qualifying but I got my three laps in and I made up about nine places in half a lap and then it stripped a gear on the distributor and lunched the engine . Since then , it has been a roller coaster journey and it was horrendously unreliable with engine rebuild after engine rebuild .”
Having sorted out the Spa issues , Keith got the Britannia back out at Castle Combe a couple of weeks later for the Autumn Classic race when he had a chassis bracket snap .
“ Then we spent the first half of 2019 ironing out the issues ,” he said . “ On the way back from Copenhagen in the summer I ’ d pretty much had enough and so I bought a new engine and since then the engine has been fine and we ’ ve been getting some good results . We went to Monza in 2019 and got our first class win , which was rather special and , I ’ m led to believe , in quite an underdog car .”
At last year ’ s Oulton Park Gold Cup he chalked up his first class pole and class win . He won the class in the 2020 championship and