Motorsport for the poor | Trialling |
new Runabout Cyclecar, having unveiled it at
the Olympia Motorcycle Show just one month
earlier.
The MCC’s “Big Three” are described as Classic
Reliability Trials because they follow the
traditional format: they are open to all types
of machine, vintage and modern, and running
on two, three or four wheels. The only real
rule is that they must be road legal and not
4WD; you’ll probably never see such a motley
collection of machinery in the same car park as
you do at the Haynes Motor Museum midnight
rest halt. The Morgans we’d come to support
were scattered somewhere among the Dellow
and Liege “trials specials”, the battle-scarred
Beetles, 80s BMWs and jacked-up modern
hatchbacks. While some spectators were
getting all misty-eyed over the classic BSA,
Francis Barnett and Greeves motorbikes, I stood
with the small crowd admiring the wonderfully
prepared MG TAs, Austin Sevens and a lovely,
and rare, NSU Sport Prinz.
Elsewhere, a team of TR7 owners stood around
discussing tyre pressures, checking kit lists
and No-Nailing back on anything that’d fallen
off, while the newbie crews nervously re-read
their route books and doodled on OS maps.
When we eventually caught up with TTM’s
John Bradshaw and Roger Gwynn in their 1973
4/4, they were hot-footing it to scrutineering.
Chris Adeney and David Pearson, in their
beautiful apple green ’52 “flat rad” +4, and the
daughter and father team of Julia and David
Murrell in their 1955 +4, were also busy with
final preparations; with cheery ‘bon voyage’ we
left them to it and headed off to find a good
spot in the forests of Devon to watch the trial
unfold.
Today’s MCC trials are more localised than the
original slogs from London, and only a third
of its current membership are bikers. However,
the basic format has changed little since
trialling’s pre-war golden age when works’
teams from all the major marques, including
MG, Austin and Morgan, showcased their fancy
new models and battled for advertising space
“You’ll probably never
see such a motley
collection of machinery.”
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