Dame David.

If, after Lee’s recent double victory over Julian in Group 5, you thought that Molesey’s racing couldn’t get any more unpredictable, think again.

For years, certainly since January 2019 when your correspondent began keeping track of these things, the club’s podium has been dominated by the Three Amigos; Julian, Josh and Lee. Week after week, month after month, year after year, one of them has been the winner. Occasionally others have muscled in to grab a second or third place and, during the Covid pandemic when grids were restricted to six and there wasn’t a space available for an Amigo, Ed won a race and David won three, but when everything has been open to everyone, the Amigos have maintained an iron grip on the podium’s top step. Not this week, oh no. Finally their stranglehold on victory has been broken.

It’s been a long time coming and it was helped somewhat by Julian and Lee’s absence this week, but at last we’ve seen someone new on the top step. David won F1!

Is David’s win an earth-shattering event? Will the world stop rotating? Will David be made a dame in the King’s New Year’s honours list? No, no and never say never. It is, though, a tiny ripple of excitement within the rarefied world of Molesey’s slot car racing.

So how did it happen? How on earth did David manage it? Pretty simple really. He didn’t crash and Josh did. Yes, that much underrated and age-old race tactic called “keeping it out of the wall” proved its worth once again.

Heat 1 was almost as normal, Josh taking the win, but it was the bit that wasn’t quite normal which was noteworthy: Josh only beat David by 0.12 seconds. Whether that put Josh under a little pressure we’ll never know – when your correspondent asked Josh after the race if he’d genuinely been trying to win, Josh said he had been – but it probably meant Josh had to try harder than he would have liked in Heat 2.

Sure enough Josh crashed in Heat 2, twice, which dropped him almost a lap behind David and ramped the pressure up just a little bit further. The same happened in Heat 3, meaning that at the half-time tea break Josh trailed David by 9.19 seconds. Little by little, slowly but surely, David was edging ahead.

Josh spent the tea break replacing his car’s hollow axles after suspecting that the originals might be bent, but it didn’t do the trick. By the end of Heat 4 David had extended his lead to 11.05 seconds. If Josh wanted to salvage victory he now had no option but to drive every remaining lap flat-out.

Heat 5 was Josh’s best of the race, chopping five seconds from David’s lead but leaving him still 6.04 seconds behind. Josh’s final heat would have to be stellar and error free. Sure enough he came out flying, quickly opening a gap to David and recording his fastest lap of the evening, but his flat-out charge took its toll and he crashed again. Bar a calamity for David, it was all over for Josh. David had broken the Amigos’ iron grip.

Josh stopped with a couple of laps still left to run, cleaned his tyres and made an unsuccessful attempt to set a new lap record as a consolation prize, but the victory was long gone. For the third week in succession we had an unexpected occupant atop the podium. Who’d have bet on that?