When I was asked many months ago, could we provide a team of marshals to run the finish control on one of the two tarmac special stages to be run on the Epynt Ranges near Llandovery, the answer had to be yes.
A total of nine Club members made their way to one of our regular motor rally haunts, the large tarmac road complex bordered on its south side by the A40 and a few miles east of Llandovery.
Our previous experience of assisting with the Tour Britannia was several years ago when a large group of us helped run a high speed test at the Mercedes World test track at Brooklands.
The event is now well established as a ‘top end’ motoring event taking its competitors around the country to a number of well known race circuits and rally venues. Its organisation is superb with Clerks of the Course for the rally and regularity element and a Race Director in charge when the competitors visited Pembrey, Castle Combe, Prescott and Silverstone.
The three day event started at Celtic Manor with a loop in Wales on the Friday, on Saturday it took in a loop into the West Country and on the final day restarted from Celtic Manor finishing at Silverstone.
The event entry fee was just a pound short of £4000. To that had to be added the costs of overnight accommodation, fuel and I am sure a few car related costs.
The event entry was split into several groups. Those who were doing the Regularity, those who were taking part in the Competition, race 1 and 2 and a further class for modern cars the Targa Britannia.
The range of cars was mouth watering, one competitor was driving a Ferrari 250 GTO and his wife had her Ferrari 275 GTB/C. Combined value of over £15 m for these two cars.
Careful study of the names on the entry list explained why so many extremely valuable cars were entered.
A billionaire and an ex-Formula 1 driver were among the competitors on this year’s event.
One of the most successful of the 70-strong entry was 1985 Indianapolis 500 winner and ex-Tyrrell Formula 1 driver, Danny Sullivan, co-driving a Porsche RSR with billionaire industrialist ‘Chip’ Connor from Hong Kong.
In a similar car, the former Williams Grand Prix driver Ian Ashley continued to demonstrate his versatility having driven every kind of racing machine from World championship sidecars to Touring cars and
Formula Ford in which he still competes.
Porsches were not the only exotic machinery. A complement of ‘DB’ Aston Martins, Shelby Mustang, Jaguar XKs and ‘E’s and a gorgeous line up of Ferrari all took part.
And it’s not just the cars which were exotic. In the regularity section there were at least 5 titled individuals. Driving a Ferrari Daytona, Count Alexandre de Lesseps, the great-great-great grandson of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez canal, who also presented the Statue of Liberty to America.
Our second Count was Joachim von Finckenstein with Countess Christina von Finckenstein in their Mercedes-Benz 220B Cabriolet. Lord Irvine Laidlaw, one of the wealthiest people in the UK and featured in the Sunday Times ‘rich list‘, drove the Ferrari 250 GTO, whilst his wife, Lady Christine Laidlaw, had a Ferrari 275 GTB/C.
Billionaire Sir Michael Kadoorie, the utilities magnate and 6th wealthiest person in Hong Kong drove a Ferrari 250GT.
Our Epynt stage was to be run twice for those in the Competitive races and the 56 cars in the Regularity got just one shot at the 4.5 mile tarmac stage.
By our due start time, we were enjoying a typical Welsh afternoon, it was raining and bearing in mind we were only four days short of mid summers day the temperature was well below par at about 10 degrees Celsius.
The first car running through the stage was one of the famous Talbot 105 Alpine team cars from the 1930s, last seen by a few of us competing at last year’s Classic Le Mans in very different circumstances, if I recall correctly it was about 30 degrees Celsius that weekend.
We then had a succession of competitors either trying to arrive on their due time or to the nearest second for those regularity competitors or trying for fastest time for the rest of the field.
Mike Pearman and Stuart Courtier were running the stop line, their task to record the competitor’s number against the time generated by an electronic beam when the cars crossed our flying finish line and enter these details on the competitor’s time card and our record sheet. Ray Vass had drawn the short straw of being out in the rain collecting and returning the time cards to the competitors. Ashleigh White and Joe Paine were at the flying finish line with our back up clock undertaking manual timing of the cars just in case the timing beam decided to give up and fail. John Lockyer was in my car keeping a log of cars who reached our location as part of our stage safety system to account for cars and identify any that went missing between the previous radio car and our location, and I was running the finish radio, keeping the radio controller updated on progress of the event.
Every thing was going well until two of the competitors decided to cross our flying finish alongside each other, something none of us on the finish line were aware had happened. The net result being our timing beam was only broken the once and it was several cars later we realised this had happened by which time each car had been allocated the next time stored on the finish line electronic clock until we ran out of times to give the last car to arrive. The net result being we had recorded incorrect times on a number of the competitors time cards.
After we were finished we were able to extract the times recorded by Ashleigh and Joe and leave the event timekeeper with a bit more work to do that evening in entering the corrected times on his laptop computer.
Apart from the poor weather we all enjoyed this year’s event and hope it comes to our part of the UK in future years.
