My Passion with David Lee: If I can’t be a Spitfire pilot, then air racing is the activity for me

Ideally I would have liked to have been a Spitfire pilot but I was born 50 years too late.

I fell in love with flying light aircraft when I was 19, initially with the Air Training Corps and then while studying agriculture at Sutton Bonington University, Nottingham.

I qualified as a pilot in 1981 and was able to gain a commercial pilot’s licence while working as a training manager with the World Health Organisation in the US between 1994 and 1996.

While I have also flown gliders for nearly 20 years, for the last three years a friend and I have taken up what has become my main flying passion – air racing.

The first air race was contested before the Second World War for the Schneider Trophy and was won by an aircraft which eventually became the Spitfire.

Today, air races are held all over the UK, in Alderney in the Channel Irelands, France and Menorca between May and September. They involve up to 25 planes in a handicap race which takes account of the capability of the entrants’ planes.

Air races are organised by the Royal Aero Club, Whitehall, which also oversees record attempts. The races, in which planes complete five laps of a 25-mile course marked on the ground by orange tents, are open to all propeller models of planes of all makes and ages from pre-Second World War to Italian fast-trainers which can travel at up to 230mph.

There are two crew members for each plane, a pilot and navigator. Each race lasts an hour and sometimes involves low flying at 700ft and even down to 50ft when preparing to land.

We compete in my racing partner’s Grumman Tiger, which will achieve about 160mph. I navigate. Each lap takes us about nine minutes.

We have won three races, sometimes by incredibly tight margins – one by a third of a second after an hour’s flying.

Races are part of a league and prizes vary from small trophies to the huge Schneider Trophy. Flyers tend not to buy planes but to buy shares in them. My own share plane is a Slingsby Firefly, which I own with nine others, and is based at Sherburn, near Malton.

The adrenaline rush in air racing is a sure cure for a hard working week. However, there are two main pleasures: the camaraderie between like-minded people and that air racing sets higher standards and raises your skill level.

Air racing also brings a huge sense of freedom and fantastic views.

I was on holiday in the south of France recently. We hired a plane and I was going round a 7,000ft peak which has an observatory on top. I realised that while they could survey hundreds of miles around, I was looking down on them. That sort of perspective is wonderfully liberating.