A few comments from my Edinburgh. Peter Manning certainly whitewashed class five with the only clean sheet. The next best being a bronze. I’m particularly pleased for Gary Booth who has persevered with his old and rather delicate Buckler, which was built by his late father-in-law, and looks like winning the Buckler Register’s trophy for the most successful Buckler in 1999. (To be fair to the others he hasn’t really had a lot of competition this year!)
I should have got a bronze, but choose to park one front wheel against an outcrop on the restart at Calton, under the eye of Peter Mountain, who will, no doubt, remind me of the incident for some time to come! The other two hills I failed were a bit of a lottery. It rained as I approached Great Hucklow so a successful climb from a restart with 18 psi in the tyres was a bit much for me, and by the time we reached Pindale at the tail end of the trial it was rather dug out to say the least. Not a good excuse, that one, as Arthur Vowden climbed it just after me! Incidentally, I discovered before the start that my Racecorp does not comply with the ACTC Kitcar Spec. sheet, recently revised. I declared this at the start and put myself in Class 8. So, we had the rather strange situation of one Racecorp in Class 8 and the other in Class 7. No one at the A5 scruitineering point was interested at all and the results team didn’t pick it up. Because of the rather strange practice that the Edinburgh organisers have of making Classes 6, 7 and 8 do exactly the same things throughout the trial, it didn’t make a bit of difference, but I hope it can be sorted before I use the Racecorp on a Classic again.
I met Robin Howard at the breakfast halt. He had an alternator problem and was going to do a few hills before the battery gave up. Then he would go home! Another thing the results team didn’t pick up was that Col (Colin Stevens) used a Skoda instead of the Dutton Special. I suspect that if you don’t finish they don’t bother to check all the details! Alan Bellamy didn’t run after putting a screwdriver through his finger but was well enough to go up to marshal on Corkscrew, for which the club is suitably grateful! I’m told that when we next see the Brasilia, we should be prepared to be impressed….
The cancellation of Putwell for the car classes was inevitable. We were badly let down by the filling station at Newhaven, who apparently couldn’t distinguish between Saturday and Sunday. As a result, the bikes had severe problems finding fuel, and hence got very late indeed. This was not helped by conditions at Excelsior, where a lot of the bikes had great difficulty. This caused such a delay that Dave Turner and Adrian Tucker-Peake established an adhoc control in the village. The villagers, bless them, did not appear to be upset. At one time, we had about 60 cars there and everyone behaved extremely well, although the running order got very distorted! Some competitors were dismayed at the amount of mud left on the main road leading out of the village and there is a looooong storey of how John Hayes dealt with this problem. Suffice to say that the duty policeman who took his call could not believe that the person who made the mess was actually reporting it and offering to pay to clean it up!
Looking back at the event as a whole, as a competitor I felt it went as well as could be expected, given the difficulties the organisers had. I certainly enjoyed it and have had many positive comments from other competitors. One of the most positive things that I felt about this event is that, at long last, we seem to be building up the popularity with the locals that the Exeter and, particularly, the Lands End have enjoyed for some time.
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