The end of summer , the beginning of autumn and a busy time in the season, if you can actually get to the events! Well some events I did, and some I didn't, largely thanks to one or other car being out of commission. I seem to have been here before. Last year my tow-car “Guppy” the Peugeot 407SW , so called as he looks like a dead fish from the front, snapped his cam-belt with the inevitable mechanical trauma to the valve train . Ouch! Meantime “Monkey” the Suzuki X90 we use for car trials had broken his rear axle… so that left me relying on my daughter Charlotte's 1970 Beetle,"Daphne" …who promptly managed to break my finger… Ouch again…but more so. I must confess that was my own stupid fault, not the car's, but it brought the season to a grinding halt and I didn't manage to take the bookstall out or compete in any more events in 2023.
Guppy pokes his fishy face out from behind my minimalist stand at Prescott in June
Fast forward to Mid summer 2024 and “Monkey” is still not back in action. I had entered the EDINBURGH TRIAL (Sept 29) as a sort of carrot to tempt me to work faster after the MOT test revealed rather more rust than was healthy. Once welding and plating started on this I found ever more rust that needed dealing with. Soon it was pretty obvious that there wasn't time to get the work done myself and get the car tested again . The Edinburgh Trial entry was withdrawn. One event down.
Monkey's footwell in the midst of being welded up…not pretty but one of my first efforts!
However I did get to the British Hillclimb round at Prescott in mid August which turned out to be a really excellent weekend in very pleasent weather with packed entry of top class cars and a new hill record. Great to see so many friendly faces there and to strike up a conversation on practice day with an ethusiastic Mancunian guy who hadn't been to the venue before and was bowled over by the close-up views of the action and the easy access. He mentioned being a singer-songwriter by trade. He bought a couple of books on credit card so I knew his name was John Bramwell but I've never been very up on contemporary music so I confess it didn't ring any bells. Anyway we got on really well and the following day he came back and enthused about the first book he'd started reading , BOTH SIDES OF THE BARRIER by Stuart Dent, which if you remember the 1970s, is motor sport nostalgia defined.
I was staying with my friends Ian and Jo that weekend and we had looked on Youtube for John Bramwell the previous evening after dinner. And there he was , playing Glastonbury, for the fifth time, on one of the big stages, the front man in the band I AM KLOOT, with an audience of thousands! Every day is a school day, as the saying goes!
A couple of weeks later I should have been back at Prescott but by then the car trouble had worsened. Not only was Monkey still on blocks with welding required, but Guppy had now failed his MOT. The work required was not huge but there were signs that the Dual-Mass flywheel needed replacement, which is no small job and made all the repair work financially impractical. I needed a new car and and I was back to borrowing Charlotte's Beetle. Deja vu without the broken bones.
With the best will in the world I could not sell books at Prescott using "Daphne" . Beetles don't have much load carrying capacity, and she doesn't have a tow bar either, so my trailer full of tables and shelves wasn't going anywhere. And anyway I would not dare! Charlotte would not be happy.
So that was a total of one event and two non-events so far this autumn. But in the meantime salvation has appeared in the gigantic shape of “Goliath”, a Ford Mondeo estate which I bought last weekend, locally, complete with tow bar, new MOT and the most enormous boot capacity of any car I have owned. And it's a bit more fuel-efficient than Guppy, which helps. Perfect for doing events in fact.
Goliath dwarfing poor little Daphne
So now I should be able to get this busy time of the season back on track to some degree. There are three more events I can trade at before winter arrives and at least one more I want to go and watch just for the fun of it. Will I get time to finish the work on Monkey and actually compete this side of New Year? Time will tell.
Meantime, a few photos from our travels in the last couple of weeks…
Guppy makes friends with a Lea Francis at VSCC Prescott
On route to a new Prescott hill record - Matt Ryder
Peter Baker's Daimler , “Doris” , the Internet Sensation!
OMS racing car designer/builder Steve Owen in one of the latest models
