Bray's Spring Fever

Neil Bray (seen here being presented with his award by Clerk of the Course Andrea Lane) won Falcons Autotest opener, despite problems with failing brakes. Keith Pettit chased Neil hard all day in his Frogeye Sprite, finishing just three seconds behind. Richard Tompkins and Arnold Lane had a real tussle for Class A honours, with Richard winning the battle.

We had a new Clerk of the Course for our first Autotest of the year, with twelve competitors lining up to do battle with the twelve tests. Andrea had come up with an original set of tests, without any reversing. Some of them looked a bit complicated on paper but they were quite logical and flowed smoothly once you got going and there were very few wrong courses. There were no new cars taking part on this occasion, but we had one new driver, Lewis Cassidy, who was sharing Noddy with Dave Nash. We were also missing a couple of regular competitors, as there was an ACTC Council meeting on the day so the councils Technical Officer Simon Robson was occupied elsewhere.

Andrea had some dramas the night before when her printer failed to play ball, refusing to recognise the four new cartridges that had just been installed. This was a big problem. She couldn’t print the test diagrams! Fortunately, technology came to the rescue. Andrea e-mailed the test diagrams to Peter Manning, who printed them on his machine and bought them along on the morning,

Neil Bray took an immediate lead and was not headed all day, although he was lucky to get to the end as his Mini blew a rear brake seal and Neil had to pour vast quantities of brake fluid into the reservoir to get to the end. Keith Pettit chased Neil hard all day in his Austin Healey "Frogeye" Sprite. This is not the trials car but the older of two Frogeye’s Keith owns. It’s the disc-braked machine Keith used for historic rallying. It was very close. Neil was two seconds in front on the first test but Keith gritted his teeth and hung on, loosing only one more second during the rest of the day to finish just three seconds behind.

Richard Tompkins was going very well as well, driver and car finding the tests very much to their liking. Richard headed Arnold Lane and Bob Tatum for honours in class A.

Martin Cheshire (Polo)	506.3
Richard Tompkins (Imp)	440.2	1st Class A
Bob Tatum (Fiat Panda)	456.34	3rd Class A
Neil Bray (Mini)	422.65	FTD
David Manning (Mini)	474.51
Michael Leete (Nova)	489.65
Peter Manning (Mini)	459.00
Arnold Lane (Nova)	449.65	2nd Class A
Lewis Cassidy (Noddy)	546.71
Dave Nash (Noddy)	482.78	2nd Class D
Mike Hayward (Escort)	544.85
Keith Pettit (AH Sprite)	425.91	1st Class D