Spring is on its way, the days are getting longer which mean the 12 car and scatter rally season is drawing to a close for the time being. At the time of writing our 12 car on 5th March is approaching and has a full entry. The support for these events this season has shown that they are growing in popularity. The scatters have had fairly low numbers generally but one or two have been very well supported. You will find the dates for the last one of each in Mark Dawson’s Compost this month (oooh arr!)

So what comes after Spring? Summer and that means the Autotest Series starts again. I have received the 2004 Series entry form and regs from Clive Cooke and they will appear next month in the Acorn. The dates are in the competition calendar at the back of this issue and printed in Clive’s intro to the series opposite, so there is no excuse for not putting them in your diaries now.

I must just mention the Kent Rally quickly, brilliant turnout of marshals with approximately 50 signing on. More encouraging still was that at least 30 of those people were 7Oaks members. Fantastic! Please keep up the momentum and we would love to see many more members out helping as marshals on our forthcoming events: the Rally of Kent, (both on set up and on the event day) and our co-promoted Lydden Sprint in April; the Autotests; our June and August North Weald and the Spotted Dick and Custard Stages on 5th September. The latter has in the past been one that tends to be a bit light on 7oaks marshals so put that date in your diaries too. The man to get more information from as usual is our very own Chris Scudder.

Now I know this topic is usually covered under the TRK‘s bit, but due to space (or lack of...) I have slipped it under here for this month. During February, only one person appeared to stand out, after having put in a superb performance at B19’s recent PCT (see my full report on page 15). Ian Crocker took the Best Performance of the Day trophy in his cutsie Fiat 126, (he is going to hate it being called that!) Well done Ian, your mug should appear on a mug tree near you very soon.

Finally a quick round up of the recent “Bowl Your Brains Out” social night, which saw 15 intrepid bowlers take to the lanes (the indoor kind this time) in Maidstone. It was great fun with as many games as we could play being the order of the evening. As it was half term we took the mini members of our family and shared a lane with Ian Crocker and partner Jennie. The Dawson pairing of Roy and Mark took on John Kemp, Daren Hall and girlfriend Sarah, with the Bilings’s, Chris Scudder and Chin making up the 3rd lane. The latter seemed to get through the games a lot faster than us but we scored higher! Yeah, yeah I know we had the bumper bars up but we didn’t use them much….honest!