Chairman's Chat

What a great way to start the New Year by winning the Autoglym Quiz. You will read elsewhere in the magazine how the team from Bristol Pegasus qualified for the National final at the Heritage Centre at Gaydon and came away as the winners.

Follow up:

I was lucky enough to be one of the team, but I have to admit that it was Tim and James who were quicker to the buzzer than myself. In fact when it came to the final, Tim was in excellent form. At one time he interrupted the Quizmaster on a question about Brooklands. Tim took the gamble that the question was going to be about the holder of the lap record and so he gave the name of the driver, the car, the date and the speed in mph to two decimal places – we never found out what the exact question was, but he got us a point.

We had an excellent day and were well looked after by Autoglym. We had time to talk to Graham Robson, who organised the Ford Motorcraft Quiz back in 1983 when Tim was the winner. With the money that Tim won, the club bought the equipment
trailer. Graham remembered this and asked if we still had the trailer.

It was good to tell him that it was only a few months ago that we handed it on to the Scouts. Plans are well underway for the Great Western Sprint at the end of
March. Several planning meetings have taken place, with Clerk of the Course Martin Baker and his deputy Mark Chater paying several visits to Castle Combe to finalise details. We are also very pleased to announce that Bristol Seat will be sponsoring the event. Bristol Seat is the new Seat dealer for Bristol and will be
opening their new facility at Feeder Road. Seat has strong links with motorsport by sponsoring a works team in the British Touring Car Championship, the World Touring Car Championship and in the recent past were F2 World Rally Champions.

There are also strong Seat links with the Great Western Sprint and Bristol Pegasus Motor Club, as the Clerk of the Course and Deputy Clerk (Bob Hart) are both Seat owners!

Our motorsport year got underway with the annual trip over the Severn Bridge for the Dick Craddy / Andy Rigler Nav Ex. It was good to have two new crews out on the event, one in a car and the other in a Transit van! The Monte Carlo Rally is now over and I thought the TV coverage was very good and an improvement over recent years. I hope you have found the &#145ave’ Channel; they are promising to have a programme every Sunday evening on rallying and also have shown some documentaries on GT racing. The Grand Prix teams also seem to have got their new cars out early and most of the teams have their driver line-up settled. Let us hope that the championship race is as close as last year, but we can do without the politics.

Our first Guest Speaker of the year will be David George who will be talking about Thrust SSC at the February club night. For those of you who go to the races at Castle Combe, David will be familiar to you, as he is one of the Commentary team.