Rambo wrote:LEC's biggest yearly outing used to be Donington back in the day before it was thought that BE would move his F1 roadshow there, which was obviously never going to happen in a month of Sundays
Donington ended up a complete farce. It was not strictly an LEC event but a Club Lotus one.
For a few years, the annual Lotus festival had been in March & track sessions were sold.
Some of it was then closed off for 'Upgrading to F1 standard' which was impossible. The place is way too small for what F1 has become & the idea of a public-transport only event was more than a little far-fetched.
This caused the the venue to close so the annual meet was moved to Malvern for 1 year...but with no track day or motor sport connection it just didn't feel the same as Donington.
The following year, Donington was open again but instead of the usual March weekend, it was August. This made a great camping weekend but Club Lotus felt attendances were poor because August was holiday season, so they moved it back to March...but not the following March because it was too soon to book/arrange it.
So after a year with no annual meet, we were back at Donington in the usual March slot...except the car park we used had now been leased to a heavy plant auction company, which make the parking a pain & we also shared the weekend with BTCC. We were told that this would present no problem, but queues of traffic all the way to the M1 on Sunday morning proved otherwise.
I don't think any of us are sure whether the blame for this failure lied with Donington or Club Lotus (maybe a bit of both), but we have not been back since.
There has been a Lotus meet at Brands Hatch in late summer/early autumn, but Donington was always considered to be the main event.