Rally Roundup
Get it Sideways Stages Rally, Saturday 17th April.
Cheltenham MC ran its annual event at Down Ampney airfield near Cricklade in Gloucestershire.
During WW2, the airfield was home to 46th Group, Transport Command and was involved in D-Day, Arnhem and Rhine Crossing operations.
Now it is given back to farmland although the main concrete runways are still very complete and the perimeter tracks are still usable but in poor condition. An ideal location for a multi use, single venue stage rally.
This was our first visit to an event at Down Ampney, but it certainly won’t be our last.
We had an enjoyable day of very competitive motorsport. Because the site is secure and was not open to spectators our job was a lot easier allowing us to concentrate on keeping our area of the stage safe and the competitors running.
We had been asked to manage Sector G of the stage which was the main runway section. This was concrete surfaced and proved to be very fast for competitors. The weather was dry and hot for the time of year and dust proved to be the only problem with several cars making continuous use of their windscreen wipers to try and improve visibility.
The event followed the well proven format of ten stages with a change to the stage layout after every two. At our position stages one through to four were the same, the cars approaching us from the south on the east side of the runway through several chicanes then turning through 180 degrees and returning in a southerly direction down the west side of the runway through a fairly tight chicane, which was to catch out several of the cars as they approached it with a little too much enthusiasm.
Stages five and six saw the cars approaching as before but now turning north on the west side of the runway. Stages seven and eight was as before but in the reverse direction and the last two stages brought the cars direct from the start line sprinting south on the western side of the runway reaching our chicane with terminal speeds of well over 100mph, before continuing along the rest of the five mile stage.
The first casualty at our chicane was one of the minis running in the historic section of the event. The locked up, lost control and ploughed into the second part of the chicane formed by about two tons of straw bales lashed together to form a three metre long by two metre high wall. He managed to reverse and continue but now minus headlamp glass and passenger door handle. We did not see the car again so it must have retired with other damage.
Our other spectacular demolition job was caused by car number 35 a very well prepared Ford Puma that simply drove straight into the first part of the chicane pushing the whole two tons of straw bails over and moving then several metres. He then got caught up with several of the wooden pallets that had been lashed to the straw, finally reversing over these and continuing having wasted several minutes.
He did continue with the event with little signs of any bodywork damage.
We also had another Mini Cooper pull off just before the chicane with a broken drive shaft. The crew were rather unhappy that new special uprated drive shafts had been purchased and fitted just prior to the event, the guarantee of ‘these will never break’ being some what unfounded. They later refitted the original shaft and this held up for the rest of the event.
A Subaru Impreza had drive train problem and was towed out by the course closing car, with some quite alarming metallic knocking sounds coming from it.
Out of the 70 cars that started the event there were just 45 finishers so a fairly high proportion of casualties along the way.
This was a really good event, the first stage started at 9 am and the last stage finished ahead of target time at about 5.15 pm, so a full day of motorsport in excellent weather conditions at a good venue and not that far from our patch.
Stages times were fairly close and by soon after midday there were only 11 seconds between the fastest and the next car. At the finish after stage ten the fastest car was competitor number 4, a 2400cc Ford Escort MK 1 crewed by Adrian Brown and Chris Jarman from South Hams/Newquay MCs with an overall time of 61.13minutes.
They beat car 8 a 2000cc Peugeot 205 crewed by Andy Corner and Ade Camp by
28 seconds finishing in second place.
Bill Bonney