At the risk of sounding repetitive, Happy New Year! They seem to come and go so quickly and with age comes wisdom right? Perhaps not, or else I shouldn’t have had to come to the rescue in the past two months of two different ladies both driving Mercedes cars. Whilst driving from job to home in my BT van, (some would say that’s all I ever do anyway, they’re just jealous), I encountered a queue. A Mercedes estate complete with frantic lady pilot, hazards on and what appeared to be a large sheet of plastic stuck underneath. Nobody dared stop and help ….it was raining, but in the interests of BT customer relations, I pulled over. Won’t take a mo to get that sheet out I thought, until I realised that it was a 3 feet square piece of ally sheet which had wrapped itself snugly around the crossmember. I’d started so I had to finish. Found one those top ten tools of Sam’s in the back of the van, the large flat bladed screwdriver and prised the ally out from underneath. Result, a happy and grateful woman and traffic flowing again. More recently and in the torrential rain that we had just before the New Year, on another job to home trip, (Ok Ok, I did have some bits from IKEA in the back of the van as well), I was getting stuck behind some old dodderer along the Pilgrims Way near Woldingham, one of Sam’s top ten fave roads, and decided to do the fork left when he went straight on. Steep downhill, lots of water, round the bend a Mercedes CLK stuck in a large pool. The lady driver’s son was out and asking a Porsche Boxster driver if he could help with a tow and then he saw me. Same question ….. let’s have a look in the back, a bit of rope and wellies, that’ll do the job. The van did struggle a bit pulling the auto Merc out slightly uphill, clutch fumes permeating the cab. All the while the Porsche driver was waiting for us to clear the road so he could go through, prat! If he thought that I’d be there for him as well, then he thought wrong. I think the son succeeded in talking him out of attempting it, but I wasn’t about to turn around, besides, it didn’t appear that deep, no more than 4 or 5 inches. After about a foot of water and a muffled engine tone and exhaust note that tells you not to stop or speed up suddenly, or worse open the door, I thought, who’d look the prat now. Fortunately the Escort van made it through. I wasn’t surprised that the low slung CLK got stranded, that could be an expensive mistake she made!
The Kent Road Rally is just around the corner. PR should have been completed by now, giving Chin at least some chance of alterations should they be absolutely necessary. As ever, marshals will be required in abundance and for the speedsters out there, this may be even more important to take advantage of than in previous years, I’ll come to that in a minute. Remember that you need to marshal or officiate at any Sevenoaks organised event to qualify for the awards in the Marketing Machine Speed championship. No marshalling doesn’t mean you can’t compete, you just don’t get a chance at the trophy. Please volunteer your help to Chris Scudder, 01474 703346 and remember to wrap up well.
The reason it may be more important to get out on the Kent is that we have lost the Lydden sprint for next year. The circuit is still in operation, but we co-pro the event with BARC, something we do in order to spread the costs, and for 2003, we had intended to hire the circuit for a full day Saturday with a sprint in the morning and BARC races in the afternoon. Pretty much the same format as the SEMSEC/ other club events then. However, available dates seemed to change on a monthly basis making planning from the BARC side very difficult. The date we originally wanted wasn’t available but the week after was. So BARC central changed their race calendar to fit in with the new date only to then be told that the first date was now available and the second one wasn’t!. This happened fairly recently and at a meeting that I don’t attend, the CCC championship co-ordinator said quite clearly that he didn’t want to end the championship at Lydden one week after Curborough and without any races available as well, the meeting would be a washout. BARC(SE) said sorry, but we can’t do anything for 2003 so it would have been down to 7Oaks alone to run a sprint there. With increasing circuit hire fees, the entry fee would have needed to be at least £100 and we would need a bloody good number of competitors at that price to boot. In light of last year’s decreasing numbers, the committee thought it would be foolish to try and go it on our own. So, as it stands for this year, we have two North Weald sprints, June 22nd and August 10th, not the dreaded October one. We are always looking and may still be able to come up with a third event at a new venue, watch this space.
The scatters and 12cars are continuing with similar support to normal, more doing the 12cars than scatters however. Both the January events will have taken place by now and for February, we have Croydon MC running the Feb 7th 12car probably starting from Westerham Garage but phone Peter Turner on 01883 623465 to make certain. On Feb 12th, in the week leading up to the Kent Road Rally, Colin Billings is organising a scatter which will start at The Park Gate Inn, Hollingbourne at 8pm, the same place as Andy Elcomb’s scatter in December. The start is just on Map 188 but the majority of plots will be on 189, so bring both maps. The March 12th scatter will be my turn at organising. I intend to start from The Crown at Turners Hill, 187/342355 and use the bottom of map 187, an area that we don’t normally get into. If this changes I will remind you all in the February Acorn. Just one small plea, let the relevant organiser know if you’re intending to enter, we’re all going grey prematurely not knowing if anyone’s gonna show! The March 14th 12car, which is a 7Oaks one, is at the time of writing, TBA.
On February 22nd, a contingent from 7Oaks will be going down to Bournemouth to help out on the Rally Sunseeker. It’s always an interesting day out in good company. If you’d like to get out of the house and come along then let Andy Elcomb know.
The article in last month’s ACORN that Nick Crush supplied about the rally marshalling scheme has saved me from writing a load of garb about it. As mentioned at the end of the article, we will be using the February 19th social evening as a training event. It will be fairly basic with videos and such and it’s as easy as filling out a form to become registered. Why do I need to be there you may be asking? Well, if you want to go and marshal on a high profile event you may find that the organisers will only take registered marshals but far more importantly to clubs like 7Oaks, if it stupidly gets passed that we can only use registered marshals for events such as the Spotted Dick, we and other clubs could find ourselves up a certain creek without a paddle. Remember, no marshals equals no events.
Finally, just a quick note to say that the Anthony Nolan karting event that a number of us were going to do got postponed due to, wait for it, lack of entries! I was looking forward to that as well, I even sneaked in a half hour practice session down at Crawley a couple of days beforehand. Karen, I owe you a fiver, don’t let me forget

Mark Dawson