Roger Dudley set FTD at an excellent September Surprise Autotest organised by Owen Turner and Julie Fleet at a new venue for Falcon.

Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures

Roger Dudley set FTD in his Scamp	The long and short of it was that Mark Tompkins won the Production Class.	David Smoley just held off Jonathan Baggot to win class D
David and Peter Manning left their Mini at home.	Adrian Gladwin won a closeley fought class B	The field was very dry and the cars cut through the turf rather than slide over it.
Arnold Lane was fastest Mini	Ed Nikel had the most interesting car.	Peter Valentine was one of the best navigators back in the LCAMC road rally days.

There was a tremendous entry of 24 for the last Autotest of the season. Three non-started on the day, but 21 drivers came to the line to do battle with Owen Turners tests. There were a couple of well-known rally names from the past taking part. Graham Raeburn, who was sharing a Metro with Fiona Duncan, is the son of Nigel Raeburn who navigated Will Sparrow to tremendous success in the Motoring News Championship. I can remember competing against Rover driver Peter Valentine who was one of the most successful navigators in the local LCAMC championship in the early 70’s but, unlike me, Peter went on to compete at international level in the RAC rally.

We had some familiar drivers in unfamiliar cars. David Manning’s Mini was fine but Peter’s Subaru towcar wasn’t feeling so great, so they had to use David’s road going Peugeot, which David enjoyed as much as the Mini! Ed Nikel definitely won the prize for most interesting car, a newly acquired Anglia Estate which Ed went up to Warrington to buy after seeing it on Ebay. At the moment it has a 1500 lump installed but a 1200 is also available.

Roger Dudley was taking part in his first Falcon Autotest of the year and bought along his Scamp to do battle with the Mini’s. For the first round Owen ran three tests, some of which were quite tight. With the big entry some professional organisation was required to keep things moving and Owen employed two timekeepers on each test to save time.

Roger used his skill and the Scamps manoeuvrability to good effect and set fastest time on the tight first test. However test two was a different story and Keith Pettit, Arnold Lane and Martin Cheshire were all quicker in their Mini’s, as was CSMA organiser Mike Bliss in his Holden Barina, which looked like a Vauxhall Corsa to me! Roger put things right on the third test and had a healthy lead over Arnold Lane after the first round. The larger cars in class B were having a ding-dong battle. The lead was constantly changing, but it was Adrian Gladwin who led after the first round.

By the second round the tests were more open. The saloons weren’t letting Roger have things all his own way, and Keith Pettit set the fastest time on test 5 but Roger maintained his lead into lunch. In class B Adrian Gladwin extended his lead. In the production class Jonny Tovey had a narrow lead over Laureen Pettit, both driving Keith’s hard working Mini.

Owen and his team had a lot of work to do over lunch as some of the tests had cut up quite badly in the dry conditions and he wanted to minimise damage to the field. This meant cutting back to three tests in the afternoon with a round of two and a round of one.

Roger Dudley took an excellent FTD ahead of Arnold Lane who was the fastest in class A. It was nice to see a non-Mini figuring in the results and Mike Biss was 2nd in his Holden just a second quicker than Keith Pettit. Adrian Gladwin maintained his lead over Richard Atherton and Peter Valentine in the closely fought class B and David Smoley bought his Westfield home just in front of Jonathan Baggott in class D. Mark Tompkins recovered form a double penalty on test one to narrowly win the production class from Jonny Tovey.

An excellent conclusion to Falcon’s Autotesting year, with a new venue, new organisers and a new winner. Roll on next summer.

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