I took my first motorsport photo in 1959 with my first-ever (and very unsuitable) camera, an Ilford Sportsman. I took my last in 2016. In the intervening years I photographed everything from F1 to small club autotest events - in all well over 20,000 photos in my archive.

For a few years either side of 1970, I submitted photos (and reports) to Autosport, Motoring News (as it was then) and the Birmingham Post, which had a regular Monday column reporting on the previous weekend's motor sport.

Work and family then took priority and I stepped back until the late 1980s when a one-off visit to Shelsley Walsh with my family saw me invited by the club's then PR Officer to go trackside again. From then until 2016 I concentrated on the far friendlier club-level events.

That Ilford Sportsman was quickly replaced by a Petriflex SLR, then a Pentax before graduating to Canon equipment. As and when money allowed, I eventually finished up with an EOS-1DX, a fabulous camera but by then weight was becoming an issue - and it was a very heavy "beast". After a long conversation with a "pro", I sold all the Canon gear and invested in Olympus, ending up with the OM-D E-M1X.

In 2016, a few mobility issues meant I was no longer enjoying all the standing around and I decided to "hang up my hat."

Over the years, all my photos had been carefully documented: who, what, where, when etc. and I have realised that relatively few photos of club-level motor sport are publicly available. As a world-renowned Jaguar-researcher said to me some years ago, the pros cover the "big" events but the small events are only covered by amateurs who rarely kept detailed records - this after finding my photo of a Jaguar XK120 competing in an autocross, with full details - and which was published in a very prestigious book on the history of the XK120 in competition.

This made me decide to publish my archive - to show what different types of motor sport were like all those years ago.