Fareham’s James Wren will have to miss the next two rounds of the Castle Combe Formula Ford 1600 Championship as a result of his heavy crash in the season-opener on Easter Monday.

Wren was just starting his second full season of car racing and although enormously disappointed with his 18th place on the grid, he was fighting his way through the field in the race when he was pushed into the barriers by Richard Lay on lap two.

His Fareham Van Hire-backed Van Diemen was heavily damaged in the impact, but James escaped with minor bruising.

“We’ll definitely have to miss the next two races,” he said. “The damage to the car could have been a lot worse given the speed and nature of the impact, but it’s still not at all good and will take a lot of time to fix. I just haven’t got the time or the money at the moment. I’m in the final months of my Engineering Degree and I can’t commit to both that and fixing the car, so something had to give for the time being.”

Wren was particularly gutted given that he should never have been within striking distance of Lay in the first place. His pace in pre-race testing would have been good enough for sixth on the grid, but instead he qualified a lowly 18th, and was at a loss to explain his slump in form. He had already made up four places in the race when Lay veered into him on the second lap.

“We should never have qualified that far down in the first place,” he admitted. “I hate to say this, but if we’d qualified where we should have done then we would have been up there and racing with the guys who can actually drive. There are some drivers at Combe who are absolutely perfect sportsmen. They’re tough competitors, but they race fairly and give each other room. But there are others who are just unbelievable…”

In the days after the accident, James has had time to think more about the circumstances of the crash, and is only now realising how heavy the impact with the unyielding barrier actually was.

“I worked out that my neck must have stretched by about an inch!” he said. “When you’re strapped into a racing seat there’s no way your head can reach the steering wheel and the front edge of the cockpit, but I definitely banged my helmet on the cockpit edge. It’s amazing what happens to the human body in an impact like that.”

With James having to sit out both the May meetings while he repairs his battered car, it will be late June before he can return to the championship. Expect him to be even more determined and fired-up on his comeback.