CLUB TITLE RACING TITLE
Back in September Club Time Attack returned to Knockhill for the first time in 11 years. Hosting seven or eight meetings per year, the championship runs between April and September each year providing a variety of track layouts with both national reach and localised audiences across the UK.
Andy Barnes explains more about the championship and what the next 20 years may hold …
How was Time Attack introduced to the UK?
Over 20 years ago, my brother and I had a car tuning company called Sumo Power, so we were specialists in tuning Japanese cars … Nissan Skylines, Mitsubishi Evos and so on … so we were backwards and forwards from Japan a fair bit. The sport‘ Time Attack’ originated in Japan, and we had been to events at the Tsukuba circuit.
Back then we were building 1000bhp Nissan GTRs, and only place that we could race them was at Santa Pod in Drag Racing – which we did – but it became frustrating that you could not take a thousand horsepower car to a Circuit Racing event! There were many people who were doing a similar thing, and so we saw the‘ Time Attack’ events in Japan, came back, spoke to several event organisers, and said‘ look, this could be big!’ but none were listening.
We had the vision. There were lots of enthusiasts like us, so we said,‘ ok …. Let’ s just do it ourselves …’ so we did. Our first event was in 2005, we had about 110, 120 competitors participating. Then in 2006 it became a fullblown championship, so there were multiple rounds, local venues, and points and so on – unlike Japan where it was only one-off events. We have done it ever since, and we still average around 100 plus teams per season in Time Attack, and 40 plus in Racing Hondas. Around the same time, we also introduced the sport of Drifting at a professional level, organising the first D1DP’ s at Silverstone which we have continued to do on and off all this time under various guises.
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Rich Sams
The Japanese origins of Time Attack are displayed beautifully with these highly-tuned cars
Revolution- November 2025
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