Escort madness!

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Chuck
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Re: Escort madness!

#41 Post by Chuck »

Gee Ram: Fair play to you, you obviously have a good "constitution"..nowt worse than a rally car that smells of puke inside..as many seemed to do 5mith 5mith 5mith .

I only did the "sack of spuds" (as we call them) role once. I spent half the event holding the stick in gear as the box decided it had had enough - then I got us lost in a loop..stupid road planners eh!! lol lol

Road rallies (Navigation events) were fun though....could never get to grips with those "hairy lines" etc but some people are designed for that sort of thing. :good:

Had the same nav pretty well all the time, bar maybe 3 - 4 events.....not bad over what was it ..nearly 20 years..WOW, that long! :o :o :o

Where we stayed there were lots of lovely little single track back roads we could use for practice. Blasting about in the wee small hours wa sgreat fun, no one around...save a courting couple or two who were rudely awakened by the Avenger on full song with all lights blazing! AWWW.. lol lol lol lol

Had the reverse happen, enjoying a night in the car with GOD (Girlfriend of the Day) - we were parked up in a layby (good name that) in the middle of nowwhere - or so we thought.

I commented about all the maddies blasting up the road at daft speeds, till a Mini screeched to a halt and some bearded bloke jumped out and battered on the window, time card in hand, looking for a time! He sure got an eyeful.. :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: lol lol lol . Seems the time control was just up the road a bit round a bend...

All prep was done at the roadside or at the old fellas lock up which contained all the parts of an Avenger bar the shell.. The wall STILL has the yellow tyre crayon marks I used when setting the lights!

One or two offs in practice were a bummer - never dawned on me those wee white flecks were the first flakes of snow not bugs and that the roads were icy....Hmmm!


This from a grass autotest - car was originaly an AUTO...c 1981 This car had more hits than the Beatles.
Chapelton nr Strathaven Grass Autotest #3.jpg
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GeeRam
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Re: Escort madness!

#42 Post by GeeRam »

cheers

Aah, yes, interrupting carnal knowledge events with spotlamps on Night Trials was par for the course back in those days......
Several of the remote start point locations in wooded car parks we used on events in the south east back then are now well known dogging locations (so I'm told)

One of the guys in our club had a car battery in a self built back pack, with fabricated grip handle holding a Cibie Oscar for searching for code boards etc lol

Grass autotests, they were brilliant fun......but we had run out of suitable locations to hold them on down here by the start of the 90's...... :cry:

Here's me doing a grass slalom autotest down near Leatherhead, back in 1986 in my Series 2 Sunbeam Ti :good:
TVMC-Grass-Slalom-Autotest8.jpg
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Re: Escort madness!

#43 Post by shoppe »

Chuck,
In the 1980s I was doing the forest rally's in the MK1 escort and never went to enter at knockhill at that time. The forests was my interest at that time.
We were third in up to 1400cc class at the time our money ran out so could not enter all the events.

I was a service crew for a team from Inverness and remembering going to Knockhill for few stages, I think it was the Scottish rally? It was front running RS1800 but he smashed it on Saturday night.

My wife had always wanted to try rallying hence my return in 2004 . I went for tarmac events due to the speeds being much higher and less damaging to the car underneath, so 2004 would have been our first rally at Knockhill and done quite a few since.
I see in your video you have footage from Ingliston, Been there about 3 times, It was the only event that made the wife sick due the nature of the very tight twisty roads.

The rally near Duns is at charterhall. Also done it a few times in 2004 and 2005.
cheers
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Re: Escort madness!

#44 Post by shoppe »

here is photo of us on the Jim Clark reveries rally.
We did slow down but still took it a bit too fast. we were catching the car front and was wanting to get past him before the road got too narrow.

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Re: Escort madness!

#45 Post by shoppe »

another from the Jim clark rally.

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Chuck
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Re: Escort madness!

#46 Post by Chuck »

Good images lads....nice looking cars.

Hi shoppe - when I wasn't competing I did motorsport photography on the forest events - so quite possible I snapped you at some point.

Looking back at my budget then (it was almost non existent) and the spending habits of the then Mrs Chuck it's a wonder I got out at all.

Ingliston was made more difficult by "keep off the grass" penalties - it made it quite like a switchback road on some places. Knockhill was used for some parts of the Scottish, spectated and marshalled there a couple of times.

I finally swapped the Manta for a 3 litre Beemer 3 series when I went back to college in the early / mid 90's. I had tried using it as a road car but it was way too noisy - and it attracted too much of the wrong attention.

We did look at doing the Classics and Historics some time back but that never took off.

The grass autotests were fun, there was a place 20 minutes from my house with a jolly decent farmer chap who let us use his field (even got it for practice one day) but that venue fizzled out.

All in all though, I only did rallying because you can do it sitting down... lol lol lol only joking. That Manta quick rack with no power steering gave me arms like Popeye!

A great sport, though I guess it's seriously expensive nowadays. Met loads of great people and generally had a great time with loads of happy memories.

cheers cheers cheers
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Re: Escort madness!

#47 Post by shoppe »

Hi Chuck.
I do not have many photos from my early rally's in the woods.

I think I have a few from the Arbroath stages and thats about it.

I have marshaled on heaps of events over the years and was the stage commander a good few times .

I was the stage commander on the 1985 ( i think ) Scottish rally at a stage not too far from Aviemore.

Car 1 was Michelle Mounton in the Audi quattro Sport.

WELL, this car took off from the start line like nothing I had ever seen. IT just disappeared into the stage chucking tons of stones at me and the rest of the marshalls. Flames busting from the exhaust ,banging ,popping, What a site !!
The car left two very very deep ruts in the soft gravel road.

The next car to start the stage was Jimmy Mcrae in the manta.

He opened the door and said to me , How the FU!! are we meant to complete against that!!
She has probably taken 10 seconds off of me in the first 2 hundred yards Jimmy said.

Jimmy left the start line and was positively slow compared with the audi

I have some great memories of these days from club autotests, road rallies and marshaling at the highest levels.

aye , it is very expensive to go rallying nowadays but it was never a cheap sport even in the 1980s we were struggling to get the money.
When I went back to rallying in 2004 until 2014 with the wife we did 44 rallies, we spent a small fortune BUT we do not regret it for second, We have made pals from all parts of Britain.

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Re: Escort madness!

#48 Post by Chuck »

That was the perks of marshalling - watching Clark, McRae, Blomqvist, Mikola, Vatanen, Arikala, Eklund, Lovell and Brookes et all in action at close range on tarmac in places like Bellahouston park or in the forests..just amazing!

I remember on the Scottish Rally - Starthclyde Park stage where mikola's Quattro shed a front wheel - he was less than pleased but motored on - but boy, were those other guys FAST - and then some.

Tried taking a photo of a lancia Stratos once when we marshalled on the Mintex one time...all I got was a green streak across the image!

I know the feeling McRae had with the Quattro - we were the same feeling when the Sierra Cosworths and ex works cars first appreared on club events - money talked. You didn't need to be a great driver because you made all the time on the straights! **** ****

Some bloke used to HELICOPTER into Knockhill, do the event and chopper out again - seriously. A CLUB EVENT too! wallhead wallhead

That blue and white Ascona in the video I posted where it wa stailing me at Knockhill was a 400...it was a flier in the right hands - luckily at that time it wasn't! lol lol lol

I remember reading an article by Andy Dawson on prepping an Avenger where he moaned that £120 for an LSD was a joke! Well it was a ton of money back then!

Yep loads of fun - wish I could do it again some day.

Chuck
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Re: Escort madness!

#49 Post by Ovenpaa »

Shoppe, in my experience of MX and Enduro, all racing is scarily expensive and even the recent budget GBP850 race car series of videos from Bad Obsession Motorsport (The Project Binky chaps) ended up at around ten times what the title suggested. Good car all the same.
/d

Du lytter aldrig til de ord jeg siger. Du ser mig kun for det tøj jeg har paa ...

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Re: Escort madness!

#50 Post by shoppe »

It is like everything in life ,if you want to be competitive need to spend money on good reliably equipment.
I once costed out how much gear I have when out stalking, over £6000 ! ( rifle ,scope, binoculars, thermal, clothing and wellies etc

When I started building the 106, things cost in the hundreds but when the build gets going things cost into £1000s.

We were at the championship awards night and met a fellow competitors wife for the first time.

She asked me why everything for a rally car cost £50 plus vat?

Her husband was behind her was giving me the nod to agree with her,

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