National B Race Licence


I did an ARDS course and passed my National B licence a few weeks ago and I thought I'd string a few words together if anyone is interested in doing this themselves.

The first thing you need to do is get a "Go Racing" pack, this can be obtained from the MSA, Motor Sports Association Limited who are the governing body of motor sport in Great Britain. The pack contains MSA Competitor`s Yearbook (Blue book), Novice application Form and a VHS Video and currently costs £39. Once you have received that you then need to fill the form in and sort out a medical with your Doctor, this will cost around £40-£100 and he will need to fill out the reverse of the application form.

Once that is all out of the way you need to decide where to do your course, I did the course at Anglesey circuit for a few reasons
  1. I have done a track day previously at the circuit so I know the track layout, and last time I clocked up over 150 laps!
  2. IMHO Anglesey is one of the best tracks in the country
  3. I didn't want to go on a course with 30 other people, there were only 3 others doing the course when I did it.
  4. I did the course whilst on a 2 day track day and the track day organisers, BookaTrack.com, who also organised the ARDS course which cost £150.
You should prepare for the course by watching the video a couple of times, all the answers to the written paper are in the video. You will need to know ALL of the flags used, you will fail if you don't! These are listed in the blue book and I have created a web page with them on here You should also familiarise yourself with the blue book, but you won't have to quote rules and regulations from it! I would recommend doing a track day before hand if you have never driven on a circuit before, it doesn't need to be the same circuit as the one you do your ARDS course at. Another good thing about doing the course during a track day is that I got in about 30 laps of the circuit before starting the course. The only odd thing that came up was the fact that the National flag can be used to start races, this is a bit obsolete as most circuits have a light system to start the races now!

The course started with the instructor talking about what was going to happen and going over the basics, we were then shown the video to refresh our memory. Afterwards the instructor took us out in his 2.0 Mondeo which was very interesting. He showed us the correct lines, most of which I was following anyway and then showed us what happened when you take the wrong lines and how much difference it makes turning in a meter too early or late.

We then went out in our cars for the driving assessment, you could use the schools Mondeo if you had wanted to. I started off, as the instructor said, building up slowly, getting faster and faster. The idea isn't to drive as fast as you can but to demonstrate you can handle the car at speed whilst keeping full control. The instructors words for what they are looking for were whether they would be happy lining up on a grid next to you in a race not. By the end of the assessment I was at about 98% just making sure to keep the car from sliding at all. He gave a few pointers about lines and turn in points as well which were very useful.

Then it was back to the classroom for the exam paper. You have to be able to answer 3 out of 3 safety questions (multi choice) and 6 out of the final 8 general multi choice questions. They were all common sense stuff that the instructor had already gone over and all 4 of us got all the questions correct and passed the driving assessment. Now I need to send off my application form and another £40 to the MSA!! So all in all it cost the best part of £300 to do the licence (the track day was extra on top)

I am going to do a few sprints next year when the twin turbo is breathing fire again and towards the end of the year I may get into some form of stock hatch racing or build a seven type of car and enter one of the many series dedicated to them

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