East Anglian Classic Rally –A Rookie Navigator’s Tale

Latest outing for “277 BRX”      17^th June 2012

With a couple of weeks to go, as a new member of Kings Lynn and District MC, I decided to to enter as a club crew for our local HRCR Clubmans Championship round in Norfolk.

Out of the total of 34 crews there were 3 Mini Cooper S’s ,2 Austin 1275GT’s and 1 very smart Wolseley Hornet . The following is his report and I hope it will encourage more MCR members to bring out their cars on Historic rallies.

This is his tale :

I received an invite from Peter Horsburgh to navigate for him on the event in his Minispares 1965 Mini Cooper S -277 BRX , and it took me all of 10 seconds to make my mind up that I would compete.

I had to apply for a National B licence and I was glad this arrived the Thursday before the event.

On arriving at Barnham Broom and after signing on I was given an envelope full of the days instructions, this consisted of a road book and all the stage diagrams.

I was left with about half an hour to plot the first two regularity sections and eat a bacon roll! Unfortunately, I did have two rather annoying gentlemen sitting on the table opposite shouting at each other.

 I wasn’t really sure what to expect but the first section was a steady drive keeping as close to the average speed as possible. We seemed to be getting on well and made it to the end of the section 12 seconds late near Stonebridge (north east of Thetford) with no dramas.

We then had a two mile drive to Larkshall where the first test was held. We were counted down off the start but I was not expecting it to be so rough but the mini handled it well.  We had a stall on the first run of the test which was disappointing but still 5^th quickest and I was really enjoying it. We then ran the same test again, this time no problems and we were 5^th quickest.

The next regularity went well only 6 seconds out from the ideal time. I then had two loops marked on my map on the next section and I missed one of them so we had to go back. Peter drove as fast as possible to try to make up the lost time to the regularity finish  close to Snetterton.

We then drove to Old Buckenham Airfield, the same test was to be ran twice but due to permission problems tests these were shortened which was disappointing. We had a slight moment on a 90 left on the first run but was 9^th quickest and 8^th quickest on the second run. This left us sitting equal 7^th at the lunch break.

After Lunch there was another regularity section that took us from Old Buckenham through to Thorpe Abbotts, this was a plot and bash section but I worked out the navigation quickly and we arrived at the end of section 13 seconds late.

The first test was very tight and too grippy and the mini did struggle but Peter drove well and we were 6^th quickest. The next test was more of a blast and we went really well apart from nearly going the wrong side of one cone. The next two test were a repeat of the previous two. We had to overtake a Morris Minor on this test, which we managed to catch very quickly. We ended up 6^th fastest over all four tests.

We then had afternoon tea at the 100^th Bomb Group Museum then on to Pulman RNAS for another test. The map for this test wasn’t to scale and was quite hard to call but we got through it 7^th fastest and the day was going well.

Then another regularity and on for this one they gave us a map. There were 5 different average speed changes, just to keep us concentrating, unluckily we got stuck behind 12 Triumph Stags on a gentle country run at a difficult T- junction and we lost around 3 minutes but managed to make some of the time back before the control and were only 46 seconds late.

We then arrived at Hethel where we took part in another two tests. These went well apart from having to stop at passage controls on the tests to get signatures on the time cards (mini sliding windows did make this quite awkward!) and we were 4^th quickest on these two tests.

The final regularity section consisted of spot heights and under and over bridges. I made a small mistake on this section and we should have avoided a spot height that I didn’t see. This meant that we were 48 seconds early to the final control.

We ended the whole event in 12^th overall, which we were both happy with and had a lovely pint of Peroni at the finish which went down very well.

I met some very friendly people and had the biggest smile on my face all day long. The Cooper S took everything in its stride and hopefully the pictures will give an idea of how much fun we had.

Results :      James Griffiths/James Howell         Austin Mini 1275GT          6^th overall

                     Peter Horsburgh/David Smalley      Cooper S                             12^th overall

                     Wesley Coleman/ Neil Guyett          Austin Mini 1275GT          21^st overall

                     John Larkin/Steve Skepper               Cooper S                               25^th overall

                     Isaac and Sarah Zarmati                    Cooper S Mk3           Retired clutch when 6th        after travelling all the way from Cornwall

                    Anne and John Giles                             Wolseley Hornet           2^nd Classic Run       

Pictures courtesy of Andrew Marston of M & H Photography       

David Smalley and Peter Horsburgh Car 13 !!!!