Clock Off, Tow On: Three Club Racers on Squeezing Oval Racing Around Proper Jobs

It's twenty to five on a Saturday afternoon and Emma Ruddock is still in her overalls, threading a van through Sheffield traffic with a race car on the back and a flask wedged between the seats.

"I finished at four," she says, indicating off the ring road. "I always book the early shift on a race day. If I don't, I'm not going, simple as that."

Emma is twenty-nine, a CNC machinist, and one of thousands of people across the UK who hold down a proper job and still turn up at a club oval most weekends between March and October. The headlines go to the teams with transporters and liveried race suits. The paddock, in reality, is full of people who've come straight from work with grease under their nails and a tea in a travel mug.

Here are three of them.

Emma Ruddock: the four o'clock finish

Emma races a two-litre banger at Buxton Raceway, a tidy, slightly battered estate car she bought for £400 and has spent two winters welding.

Her Saturdays start at 6am, which is the first thing she apologises for. "I've got a routine and it's not a nice one. Up, walk the dog, load the van because I loaded it on Friday night and forgot something anyway, then work."

The prep happens midweek. Monday for checking the car over, Wednesday for anything that needs a spanner, Friday for loading. The race car lives on a trailer on her mum's drive in Chesterfield, which is a favour she says she's been repaying for six years and has no intention of stopping.

"The thing people don't see is the hour after the meeting," she says. "You come off track at half nine, you're tired, you've probably got damage, and you still have to strap it down and drive home. I've got back at half one before. Then it's a wash and a cup of tea and Sunday's gone."

Does she ever think about packing it in? "Every March when I get the insurance renewal. Then I do one meeting back and I remember."

Callum Doig: quarry dust and hot rods

Six hundred miles north, Callum Doig finishes a shift at a quarry near Kirkcaldy at 5:30 on Friday, has his tea, and then spends until midnight under a hot rod that has never once been finished.

He's thirty-six, runs plant machinery for a living, and races at Lochgelly — a circuit he describes, affectionately, as "the closest thing to an old-school racewall you'll find".

"Fridays are for the car, Saturdays are for the family, Sundays are for racing," he says. "That's the deal I made with my wife and it works because I actually stick to it. The minute I stop sticking to it, it stops working."

What that looks like in practice is a lot of preparation squeezed into small windows. Parts are ordered on a Sunday night with a pint in hand. Bodywork gets done in the winter. The car goes on the trailer on Saturday evening, ready to roll at 9am the next morning with two kids in the back seat and a bag of sandwiches that has already been picked at.

"The kids love it, which helps. My eldest knows the car numbers better than I do. But there's a cost, and I'm not going to pretend there isn't — I've missed things. You've got to be honest about that, or it eats at you."

Sam Beddow: nights in a warehouse, Saturdays on a grasstrack

Sam is twenty-seven and works nights at a distribution warehouse outside Peterborough, four on, four off. The shift pattern is either the best thing that's ever happened to his racing or a sleep-deprivation experiment, depending on which week you catch him.

He rides grasstrack in the Eastern Centre and has started doing the occasional amateur speedway second half. His van is a mobile workshop: two bikes, a box of sprockets, three sets of gloves and a spare chain he's never needed but refuses to leave behind.

"I finish at six on a Saturday morning, get home, put my head down for three hours, then get up and load," he says. "My missus thinks I'm mad. She's probably right. But there's something about riding when you're that tired, when you're just running on tea and nerves, that keeps you honest."

He's had one bad off this year — "nothing dramatic, just me being a numpty on a cold engine" — and it has made him stricter about his own routine. Bikes get checked before the shift, not after. Gear gets laid out on the Thursday. Nothing is decided in the last twenty minutes.

The quiet economy of a race weekend

Add up the fuel, the entry fee, the consumables and the odd replacement panel and you're looking at £80 to £200 for a club meeting, before anything breaks. Most of the people doing this are not trying to make that back. They're trying to have a decent Sunday.

That means the costs get met in other ways. Second-hand trailers. Shared transport. Lifts for a mate in exchange for help with the spanners. A spare engine that's passed around three drivers in the same class and has been rebuilt so many times it's basically a family heirloom.

"People help you," says Callum. "That's the bit that keeps you coming back. Someone lends you a wheel, you lend them a welder, and the whole thing keeps going."

And yet the alarm still goes

The strange thing, talking to all three, is how little romance there is in the answers and how consistent the conclusion is anyway.

Emma gets up at six with a full shift ahead. Callum spends Friday night on his back on a cold floor. Sam sleeps for three hours and then drives to a field. None of them pretends it's easy, and all three of them do it again the following week.

"I've had people ask me why I bother," says Emma, parking up and pulling the handbrake. "And I don't have a good answer. I just know that when I'm sat on the grid, waiting for the green, whatever shift I've had that week doesn't matter anymore."

The flask comes out of the door pocket. The trailer gets unhitched. Half an hour later she's signing on.