Rally Rattlings

It’s all been happening on the rally front since I last put finger to keyboard, the first Scatter has been and gone, the Rally of Kent has been and gone and some of us have been road rallying. What’s more is that there’s lots more to come.
The Rally of Kent was, despite much worry and sweat, a success with most having a good time. The weather couldn’t have been better, considering the awful weather we’d experienced the previous weekend who could have guessed that we’d be in shirtsleeves in the sunshine for both the setting up on the Friday and the event on the Saturday. To emphasize the point the Sunday was back to being normal autumn weather. The setting up was an interesting day, being on military land, with very young lads toting loaded guns to welcome us I started off being a bit nervous, but we soon settled into the task under the guidance of Andy Elcomb (Stage Commander) with a good bit of help from you lot out there, we must have numbered some twenty or so happy volunteers. Despite that the day wore on and by the time we’d done all that was necessary it was almost 7.00pm and I should have been in Ashford before 6.30 to collect the Freelander we were using as Course Closing car – fortunately between Colin Billings and Willie (of Bexley LCC) I was able to collect it later. I was yet to receive any instructions for the day but it was intimated that they’d be waiting for me at the start and as I was sharing the day with a work colleague and her car crazy son, neither of whom had any experience of this kind of thing, I was a little apprehensive.
The start was in a nice shiny new shopping centre in Ashford with a start ramp in the main car park. As I feared there was no map book or other instructions left for me so I grabbed a competitors road book as the only schedule available. Sue Billings and Bexley’s Sue Sansom were in charge of the start with the Mayor of Ashford flagging the cars away, all very traditional. This was only for the Rally of Kent and the Ashford Rally with the start for the Kent Forestry Rally moving to the nearby Asda car park, presumably to leave the shopping centre free for punters.
After all the competitors had left we set off, fortunately to the first stage at Kings Wood so I knew how to get there and also, by chance, had a map of the area. Following a road book without a trip meter and in Saturday traffic proved difficult so we made our own route, a technique which we found only worked if we had the map of the area. Having cautiously driven Kings Wood finding the Freelander’s suspension to be rather soft we set off to find stage 2, Hempstead Forest. This is on map 188 which I didn’t have with me and so after queuing in much traffic through Headcorn I thought ‘I know who’ll have one – young Gordon!’ So off we detoured to find him in and able to help, but by this time we were so far behind schedule that we radioed in to tell Control that we’d cut to Lodge Hill stage and get back on schedule. We were lucky that the course openers were able to collect our paperwork and keep the results team happy.
We were able to find our way from Lodge Hill to the two venues on Grain and the day was back to schedule from there. We had a gentle bash through the two Grain stages which were twiddly in the extreme and once we got back to Service at Detling we were at last able to pick up our map book and time schedule and actually enjoyed a gentle thrash through the last three forest stages (although Kings Wood with the arrows removed was taken with caution!)
All in all a fun day – rounded off with a puncture as we pulled off the M2. Being a lazy git I managed to persuade Nick Hedges to change the wheel for me.
Thanks to all who worked so hard to get this event on, it’s another feather in Sevenoak’s hat with potential for more. There are lots of lessons to be learnt but we have a sound basis for which ever way the event goes next year.
On to the more serious events, our first scatter was well attended and (despite a couple of errors on my part) went well with Doug Kingsley/Ben Greenfield (B18MC) pipping Mark Dawson/Daren Hall for the win. The event was under some pressure as I discovered that I’d packed all the necessary paperwork, except the navigation. I’ve never traveled from Home to Kemsing so fast before, once I’d printed the all important sheets.
Following all this I was actually out to play on a proper rally, the Pheasant Plucker, which started and finished near Alton and covered 160 getting on for 180 miles of Hampshire and environs. Andy Coshan was back in the director’s chair and was in good form. We were seeded 9th and we had some good company with Graham Child/ Kevin Ablitt at 17, Jason Mortlock/Bill Smith at 28 and Mick and Chris Rose at 35. The navigation for Experts and Semis was fairly ‘varied’ but Andy got on top of it right away and we stayed clean to the first petrol halt along with three others. We had our first bit of trouble at TC24 where the navigation foxed us – it was a straight herringbone with a loop out of it (come to Rally School and I’ll explain) and I should have recognized it but didn’t, anyway, we had a guess and picked up the necessary Route Checks but had to take a sneaky peek in the next envelope to find the Control. We were not the only ones to have trouble with this but were very lucky in that the Control was not manned so we hurtled to the next TC losing only four minutes in the process.
There was a lot of fog/low cloud about which made the going hard from time to time but we managed to clean the rest of the event. With a total of four minutes we were 3rd overall behind Mike Biss/Kath Woodman and Mike East/Roger Davison who were both clean but had also benefited from unmanned TCs, Kath had also opened an envelope and Mike East had a WD later in the night.
All our crews finished with Graham and Kevin 10th overall 3rd in class on 48 minutes, the Roses dropped 206 minutes to finish 5th Clubman and Jason and Bill ended up with 9 fails and 697 minutes in 11th place in the Clubman event. I thoroughly enjoyed my night out and it’s great that we can provide three and a half crews, more than most clubs.
Then there was our the Tempest Stages and a small bunch of us went to help run a start/finish as a thank you to the Sutton & Cheam MC folk who helped on our events. For all these events the weather was kind to us unlike our fellows at North Weald; our friends out on that event have our sympathy.
The weather still held for the second Scatter run by Colin Billings on Halloween with even more crews out (11). The winners this time were ‘Scared’ and ‘Scary’ Elcomb, second again were Mark & Daren followed by Keith and Ian Crocker. I hope the newcomers also had a good time out and will join us for the rest of the season and perhaps try a 12-car. Our first 12-car will run on 16th November 2001 starting in the layby on Wrotham Heath 627587 at 8.00pm using map 188. Again this will be very simple intended for novices but if experts want to play I may set some harder navigation.
Rally School will again be on the 4th Wednesday – 28th November at the Bell, 8.00pm - all welcome.
Well, that’s about all for this month – it’s nice to have lots to write about – other than to report continuing success for our stage crews in the Rally 2001 championship, keep it up chaps.

Chin

Scatter 10/10/01

Scatter 31/10/01

The Acorn : November Edition