Where Have We Been? First Blog Since Spring

You may well ask. No blog since the spring? No news then? Been on extended holiday or something? No!

I can guarantee you that aside from 4 days in Cornwall during August we have been working away as normal and attending events… but for some reason the Blog-habit took a back seat for the past six months. Life rather got in the way.

So have we been out at events with the books ? Oh yes indeed! It's been pretty busy in fact and we managed to take in two events at the “World-Famous Shelsley Walsh” as well as Prescott, which is our usual haunt during the season. One event is still left to do, the RALLYE PRESCOTT on November 7th . That was good fun last year as the diverse mix of historic and contemporary rally machinery tackled the Cotswold hill in both the daylight and the darkness(below) . We are booked in for that one and the LED lights are being packed along with the battery so we should have illumination after the sun (lets be optimistic!) sets…

Earlier in the year we did the Bike Bonanza at Shelsley which was something different and while not overly busy, it was enjoyable. As ever a lot of familiar faces from 4-wheeled motorsport were present, reinforcing our theory that there is not the massive Car vs Motorcycle divide that some people would have you believe. In our experience (going back a scary 41 years now) most people interested in one form of motorised transport are interested to a degree in all the others.

Lots of our car-enthusiast customers also own bikes and in the case of British championship-winning racing car designer/builder Steve Owen of OMS, actively compete in both two and four wheels. Steve loves sports mopeds in particular , as does his most successful customer Trevor Willis (three time British hillclimb champion) . The image of these two chaps, used to firing V8 engined single-seaters up narrow hills being enthralled by the kind of 50cc machines which we as 16 year olds were trusted with prior to getting ‘serious’ cars or bikes, is quite amusing. But it just shows that if you like the mechanical aspects, then pretty much anything with an engine possesses a natural attraction!

Aside from the Bike Bonanza we were back at Shelsley's CLASSIC NOSTALGIA event in July, having missed last year due to being too slow in booking in… This time it was not an issue, and it was a really nice mid-summer event under blazing skies with a big crowd. But it was very dusty. I always end up seeing old freinds at this event and this year among them were SPEED RECORD CLUB members Neil Gilfillen and Steve Berry (I was a member for many years). Catching up over a pint in the paddock bar, it didn't seem like 20 years since I'd last met Neil at Coniston in the lake district .

In the paddock were a wonderfuil selection of rally cars including numerous Group B Audi Quattros, Group 4 Escorts, Group A Subarus and a couple of cars from the late Richard Burns collection, reminding is of the 20th anniversary of his tragic early death from a brain tumor while still at the peak of his world rally career.

Also a supoerb array of historic circuit racing machinery from Chapparrel and McLaren Can Am cars of the 1960s to Haas-Lola and Benetton F1s from the 1980s and 90s. Sadly the most exotic F1 car present, an ex Schumacher B192 driven by Lorina McLaughlin, managed to catch it's airbox on fire while returning to the paddock and after the extinguisher foam had been cleaned out of everywhere it headed home on the Saturday evening. Probably my favourite cars were the two McLaren M10B F5000s . The ex McKechnie/Mike Walker/Roy Lane version in factory colours is a familier sight in recent years but the be-winged blood-orange version (above) run in the 1970s by Le Mans racer Ian Bracey is one that hasn't been seen for many years. Two wonderful analog racing cars you could fix with spanners!

Talking of McLarens, we did the BUGATTI OWNERS CLUB Garden Party the same month. This is really a ‘run-what-you-brung’ track day for the members at Prescott , the hill the club actually owns, and the star turn was Rupert Marks ex George Eaton McLaren M12 Can Am car (below) from 1969 which he drives half way across the country to compete! It has no headlights so can only drive on the highways in daylight and with it's wonderfull patina and enormous Chevrolet V8 engine is one of the great head-turners on British roads at the moment.

The other star of the event was Ed Burgess's Bugatti T51 (below) which has recently set the hill record for the marque. Ed's ‘other car’ is a Gould single seater with an Opel V6 DTM engine in the back . He follows the Henry Ford mandate for paintwork in that "you can have any colour you like so long as it’s black' !

We did several other events during the spring and summer including the Prescott Italian car day and a small event there that almost as an aside had a gathering of 300 Ferraris in the car park…

There was also the ‘Historique’ which featured a number of delictable Lotus single seaters and that works livieried F5000 McLaren(below) I mentioned earlier, a car which won at Monza in the 1970 European F5000 series…

We also had the tear-to-the-eye sight and sound of a Supermarine Spitfire making a low fly past in fabulous clear skies. Oh that sound! Nothing else looks and sounds quite so emotive.

Almost topping and tailing the season were the two British Hillclimb Championship events, both very exciting and in particular the most recent which was the title decider where the championship was finally retained by Matt Ryder (Below) after a three way battle decided by a win-or-bust run by former champion Wallace Menzies (lower) who unfortunately spun into the bank on his final run. But he tried!

Hats off to both drivers and the other challenger Will Hall, for making it such a memorable event, boosted by unprecidented online PR in the weeks beforehand and a huge crowd that packed the venue . It's a long time since the atmosphere at Prescott has crackled in such a fashion. Lets hope they can build on this and brings some more bumper crownd through the gates next season.

That left just the Vintage Sports Car Club's 'Long course' event in late September , so-called because it uses the full course, like every other event here except the traditional August VSCC event which sticks with the shorter pre-war layout. This was a lower-key but still very pleasent event. The sunshine was beautiful, the entry was good, the only issue was the trade stands being located in a different place where the footfall was poor and so sales were disappointing. And a lot of people actually never found us! We could not hire our usual marquee for this one-day meeting so we ended the season (almost) as we begun at the test session ‘travelling light’ with just the car and a couple of tables of books…trusting it would not rain!