Things looked so very different at the start of the weekend, when Wren unveiled his immaculate Dalmeny Racing Van Diemen, fresh from a summer-long rebuild enforced by a previous accident at Thruxton in June, where James was the innocent victim of another driver’s error and found himself becoming violently acquainted with the barriers at the fast first corner. The post-Thruxton repair was the first time James and his small family-based team had set the car up without professional assistance, and they were justifiably pleased with their handiwork.

“The car runs and handles surprisingly well,” said James after qualifying a circumspect 24th. “It has a bit too much understeer and it’s running quite hot, but for a first attempt at rebuilding the car ourselves without outside help, I’d say we’ve done a pretty good job. The qualifying time is okay too considering this is the first time we’ve run the car since the accident as we didn’t have the time or the money to do a pre-race test by the time the rebuild was finished. I’m a bit disappointed with our grid position but to be honest I was taking it easy for most of the session and just making sure everything worked.”

With two races this weekend, Wren was planning to work his way through the slower cars on Saturday to ensure a more respectable grid position for Sunday’s race, where the starting order would be based on the previous day’s results. After a surprisingly hesitant start (perhaps a legacy of his race-rustiness), James stormed past four cars in one courageous move on the fifth lap, as those around him panicked in the wake of Geoff Fern’s pack-scattering spin at Camp corner. The dawdling stragglers dispensed with, Wren rapidly got amongst the quicker cars and came home a pleasing 15th after winning a last lap skirmish with Steve Hawkins. That should have set the scene for a charge into the points on Sunday, but the reality would be devastatingly different.

“My start was absolutely dreadful, so much wheelspin!” James recounted. “I saw Roly Hamblin (a hobby racer notorious for his leisurely pace) shooting past me and knew straightaway that it was going to be a bad afternoon…”

James recovered some ground to run 18th, but then on lap three the worst fears of Wren’s family, friends and supporters came true, as a wayward rival clipped his rear wheel in the Bobbies chicane and sent James rolling across the track.

“It felt like something out of a computer game,” he said next day. “I just remember seeing lots of blue sky, then everything going dark when I hit the ground, then lots of marshals standing around me. Next thing I knew I was in the back of the ambulance.”

Mercifully James emerged shaken but largely unscathed, although he was referred to his local doctor for precautionary checks.

“I have to give Castle Combe plenty of praise for their medical facilities and the efficiency of their medical staff,” said Wren. “They provide a first class service and I was very well looked after. Luckily I was okay and although the car is a mess, the damage wasn’t actually quite as bad as we expected.

“I didn’t think it was actually possible to roll a Formula Ford car, it just never crossed my mind that it was something that might happen during my racing career! One of the drivers who was running a few cars behind me said he couldn’t believe how high up in the air I was, so I was obviously doing the fighter pilot thing pretty well…”

Wren’s horrendous luck in recent races has come as a shock to a driver who rarely put a mark on his car in his first seasons of competition in the late 1990s.

“I managed to race for two years with barely any accidents or non-finishes, and now I’ve had two massive crashes in two races,” he pondered. “Maybe I’ve used up all my bad luck and everything will go perfectly from now on…

“It’s the sort of incident that can happen when you end up racing at the back where all the lunatics are though. We’re quick enough to be ahead of all that sort of thing, but at the moment we’ve been trying to do all our testing in the short qualifying sessions and as a result we’re starting races much lower down the order than we should be. The racing’s actually closer at the front, but the drivers seem to have more awareness of each other and a bit more respect – they don’t try that sort of crazy move.”

It would be understandable if this run of catastrophes was giving James misgivings about his motorsport career, either for financial or health reasons. Real racing drivers don’t think like that however, and Wren is already planning his next comeback.

“Now isn’t the time to stop racing,” he insisted. “If we were finishing fifth all the time and showing no signs of getting any faster, that would be the time to stop. We’ve been making progress and we can’t give up just because this is a bit of a low point. It’s like falling off a bicycle, if you don’t get straight back on then you never will. Having said that, I can’t get back on track until the car’s fixed, so our 2003 season is probably over now. I think next year we will probably spend the first part of the year doing a lot of testing and getting properly up to speed, so that when we go racing we’re not losing time sorting the car out and can actually get on with competing with the people we should be racing against. Not running around at the back trying to escape the lunatics!”

Such sentiments would probably earn any normal person a holiday in the nearest padded cell, but racing drivers have a rather different life philosophy. For while the prospect of another colossal repair bill and many more weeks of gruelling work on the battered green Van Diemen-Ford is undoubtedly daunting right now, James Wren is encouraged by the knowledge that only his abysmal luck and episodic testing programme is keeping him from demonstrating his true ability at the wheel of a racing car. The 2004 season surely has to bring the change of fortune he so deeply deserves.