Memories 8


After my motorcycling days came to an end and married life set in there was no excitement in my life, (mechanically I mean!) then one day I was made redundant from the company I worked for building drawbar trailers for the Ministry of Defense and Brenda's Dad said there was a job going at the shop he worked in repairing domestic appliances, so, to save getting a beating off my dearest for not working I spoke to Chris and joined the place, I soon fitted in and quite enjoyed working there but one day he came in with a great big cylinder head from a car and instantly my interest bells were jangling especially when I found out it was from his racing car. Chris was building a four wheel drive Ford Escort powered by a Rover 3.5 litre V8 later in that evening I was still in the shop helping to overhaul the head and soon every Sunday I was in his garage helping him build the car. We knew it wouldn't be ready for that race season so I took to going along to watch the autocross events with him and a good friend of his, John Kirkup, had built his own style of racing car from scratch. It was resembling a formula one type car but much stronger and higher to take the pounding over the rough ground because autocross isnt on a race track but meadows, fields after the corn was cut, it was all off road racing and one day I just arrived at the circuit and a car doing official practice went absolutely hammering down the back straight, it was John Kirkup in the curiously name Googleplex. Seemingly a young boy was asked by his father what word he would use to describe something that took forever to do and that is the name the boy came up with for it had took John years to build the Plex, (sorry that became its pet name) after that I was hooked I raced the next year in a beginners class driving a 998 mini partially modified and won the class at the end of the year, I repeated it the next year but being 34 I thought it was time to move out of the "baby class" and join the men so I built a 1298 mini for class two and in 1990 I was thrashed into fourth place, but came back in 1991 to win the class. The next year I went into class 5 and entered a fully modified 1480 mini and went up against the big guns sadly in late |September I was chasing a Fiat X19 when I turned the car over pretty spectacularly and I had to do it the day Brenda was watching so after about 90 autocross outings my dear wife said "No! that is the end, the girls want their dad home at nights" so I was retired. Look in my pictures pages I've included a page from an autocross for you.

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