“Into the Esses Alan Slater made a real do-or-die manoeuvre,” James explained. “I had to go into the escape road to miss him and that dropped me to about 20th. I passed the slower guys pretty easily, but then Barry Baxter and Ian Riley collided and they red-flagged the race. That was a lucky escape for me because I’d just passed Barry myself and the accident happened about a car length behind me.”

Back up to 15th by the time of the incident, James still had time to make up more ground in the six lap re-run, but unfortunately his fired-up enthusiasm got the better of him.

“Because of everything that had happened already I was fairly wound up by this stage,” he sheepishly admitted. “So I jumped the start in fairly hilarious fashion. It wasn’t deliberate, I just over-anticipated and went at the red lights rather than the green. Everyone else was still sitting there so it was pretty blatant…”

Wren fought his way back up to tenth, but with the time penalty for his false start added, he would be classified an unrepresentative and frustrating 15th.

At least Sunday’s race offered a rare second chance. Again tenth on the grid, this time he had 12 laps to make progress. Even better still, a morning downpour had left the track surface somewhat treacherous by the time the race began, conditions in which Wren’s talent and feel for grip allow him to overcome the handicap of his lack of track time and experience.

Another bad start gave him work to do however, but by lap three he was back into ninth place and chasing hard after Wayne Poole. The latter was thinking about his championship position and had no qualms about letting James past, allowing the Dalmeny Racing driver to get on with challenging Hugh Elliott for seventh. He quickly closed the gap to his rival but then their battle was interrupted by the flying John Hutchinson, who had clinched the championship in race one but was now fighting back through the field after spinning on the first lap.

“The only person I couldn’t handle today was John Hutchinson,” James said afterwards. “But then he was absolutely flying- his lap times were nearly three seconds faster than anyone else managed this afternoon.”

Elliott and Wren were both passed by the determined champion, but once Hutchinson was out of the way and heading off after the lead battle, James wasted little time in moving ahead of Elliott and into eighth. This would have been his best result yet, but then another untoward incident was to drop him back behind his sparring partner.

“After I passed Hugh, it was the first time all race that I hadn’t been stuck behind someone slower,” Wren explained. “Coming down into Camp corner I must’ve thought I was the king of the world or something because I braked really late and went off over the grass. I don’t know what it looked like from outside, but it was a real heart-stopper from where I was sitting…”

The Dalmeny Van Diemen slid helplessly across the sodden grass before James regained control a fraction of a second before he would have hit the pit wall. He sent team personnel diving for cover as he scampered back onto the track just in time to see Elliott cruising past him once more.

“Things got a bit difficult when I was behind Hugh again,” Wren said. “I’ll try not to swear about it, but some of his driving was definitely not very sporting. You can’t expect people to just jump out of the way though, and it’s what you expect when you’re fighting some of the really quick guys. But there’s a lot of tactics that only a driver really see’s going on…”

Despite a desperate last corner dive, James was forced to concede eighth place to Elliott, although ninth was still enough to give him 11th place in the championship, not bad at all given that nearly 60 drivers entered the 2000 series.

“It would have been nice to do a bit better today,” he admitted. “But then our targets for the season were to get down to lapping in the 1m13s bracket and to score some points. We’ve been in the points in four out of nine races and we’re only 0.1s away from our target time. We’ll be back next season, and we’re not giving up until we’ve won.”