PAUL HORTON is back on track to win the National Hot Hatch Championship after an extraordinary winning performance in torrential rain at Silverstone.

The Chandler's Ford driver had to battle on for three-quarters of the race without windscreen wipers!

After freakish mishaps in the previous two rounds had badly dented his championship hopes, Horton desperately needed a good result.

And when the heavens opened it was an answer to his prayers. His Ford Fiesta is conceding horse power to a couple of leading rivals but on a wet track everybody starts equal and that's when Horton comes into his own.

But after qualifying third and taking the lead on lap three of the Demon Tweeks/Yokohama 750 series race, the wipers packed up. "Luckily we'd put some special water resistent liquid on the windscreen before the race which makes the rain drops literally bounce off it," said Horton.

"The trouble is the windscreen mists up, so visibility was pretty poor any way for something like eight laps of what was a 12-lap race."

Horton, incredibly, still saw his way clear to building a five-second lead and then rebuilt it again after the safety car had come out following one of several accidents.

Victory lifted Horton within seven points of championship leader Carl Lawrence but after establishing a slight early-season lead, the young Hampshire racer feared that two bad meetings at Cadwell Park and Lydden had cost him the title.

The double header at Cadwell looked to be going to plan after Horton qualified fourth but while he was running in second place in the early stages, a piece of rubber flicked up off the lead car and incredibly found its way into the car-burretor of the Fiesta, causing a major misfire.

Poor Horton could only sit and fret as the car went backwards into last place. Unfortunately finishing places in race one determined grid places for race two and Horton had to start on the back of the 28-strong grid.

He battled to fifth place by the chequered flag and clocked the fastest lap but he lost his title lead to Lawrence.

Bad fortune followed Horton to Lydden where he again put the Fiesta fourth on the grid and once more picked up two places to shadow the leader. But again the car suffered a huge power loss when a lead slipped out of the distributor cap. Horton had to pit the car to put it right and by the time he got back out, he had lost all chance of finishing in the points.

The Fiesta Horton drives is 14 years old and although it has a new engine, it's about 30bhp down on some of the other front-runners.

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.