BTRDA® Grand Final Report

Date: 21st October 2007

Early morning mist, the heavy dew from the previous night, and a light ground frost made for some very slippery conditions at the superb Catton Park venue near Lichfield.   

The expected closely fought battle in Class A was engaged to the full, with only nine marks separating first to last after the first round.  Les Andrew's Peugeot 104 decided that it had enough then and the diff disintegrated, so an early trip home to North Yorkshire was the result.  Neil Mackay (Panda), Garry Preston (Fiat 127) and Barrie Parker (104) continued to swap marks here and there and also to drop the odd clanger to keep things really interesting!  At lunch, there was but four marks between them, with David Holmes only nine further back.  Parker threw away his chances with three uncharacteristic afternoon mistakes, so Mackay and Preston went into the last round just one mark apart.  Preston made two good climbs on the final round and so took the class by five.  Parker held off the challenge from Holmes, and young Jo Preston (sharing Dad's Fiat) drove brilliantly in only her second season of trialling to stay in touch in such exalted company (the other five in her class are all previous Gold or Silver Star champions).

Siôn Matthews borrowed the Clerk of the Course's Vauxhall Nova, and got to grips with it quickly.  However, Simon Harris (Golf) consolidated his class win here two weeks ago and didn't let the other two Class B entries have much of a chance.  He won each round (except the fifth, when an error on a hill he had cleaned before, spoilt the record).  Derek Barnes found the slippery conditions not to his liking at all, and the heavier Mk3 Golf was a real handful on the day.  They finished Harris, Matthews, Barnes, each exactly 40 marks apart.

During the previous fortnight, Steve Courts and Dave Oliver had changed their Imp engines to standard 915cc units to enable them to enter Class C for this event.  The move proved beneficial to their causes and they anhilated the usual protagonists in that class.  They won each round easily to leave Malcolm Brown (Westfield) trailling in at the Imp's combined score, and the Fiat X1/9 and MGBGT of Dave Harvey and Richard Harrison in the distant reaches of over 200.  However, the Imp battle was closer than at first appears.  Courts won the first round and had excellent climbs throughout the day - except on a particularly deceptive hill which he managed to psych himself out of on every round.  Oliver never scored worse than a one here, but Courts was never better than a five: thus he lost 32 marks on the six rounds on that one hill.  The difference at the end of the event?  32 marks.  What could have been...........

The two competitors in Class D were not evenly matched, and John Ludford didn't have a particularly good day in his heavily ballasted Marlin, but still finished less than half of Howard Blackwell's score in the Suzuki X90.  Blackwell just couldn't get the car to grip and managed just one clean on a day he would probably rather forget.

Lowest score of the day by far (by 32, actually!) and the lowest index score made Dave Oliver a worthy champion and the Gold Star® winner for 2007.  The Silver Star® winner, from points accumulated throughout the season, was Garry Preston with David Holmes runner up.  The Bronze Star winner was Derek Barnes, with Siôn Matthews finishing second.