Graham Robson
1960S ROAD RALLYING
Graham recalls fondly the harumscarum road rallying of the 1960s.
Occasionally, just occasionally, I’m allowed to talk about motorsport in the classic era, and this issue I want to recall the real harumscarum road rallies of the early 1960s, a period when I started rallying seriously as a co-driver. Those were the days just before the first 'homologation specials' had been invented, a time when most rallies started at pub-closing time on a Saturday and ended in time for breakfast the next morning.
Even though the UK’s organising body (the RAC MSA) imposed 30mph maximum speed schedules on open roads, almost every event organiser ignored these edicts, such that prestige events held in the newlyfounded Motoring News Championship were really a combination of route-finding and out-and-out control-to-control road races where the roads were tiny and other traffic didn’t exist. Some would feature strings of road sections just four minutes apart, and at other times the setting of control clocks would make 50mph averages necessary! It was not until closed roads were used in the Isle of Man, or in Northern Ireland, that true high-speed motoring was regularly available.
It is amazing, then, to recall that the vast majority of entrants had Austin A35s, Sunbeam Rapiers and hotted-up Sprites, for it was only the rich mill owners from the north ('Knowldale Country') who could afford a TR3A. This, though, was the very beginning of the Mini- Cooper period, and the development of faster and ever faster Ford Anglias, often with 1.5-litre engines. Few cars had disc brakes, and only those whose wheels could accept 15in Michelin X tyres had radial-ply rubber.
Although this was a period when what became known as the Knowldale Circus (based on ruthlessly competitive drivers from Lancashire like Reg McBride, Don Grimshaw, Roy Fidler and Philip Simister) became dominant, it was amazing who would turn up in weirdly unsuitable cars and expect to be competitive, and how many such people there were. Roger Clark started in a Ford van, occasional hopefuls turned up in Mk1 Jaguars, and there was one man in an Austin Westminster A110 who gave nightmares to those of us who had to pass him on country roads.
Although none of us dressed carefully for the occasions, (the first time I appeared in a Les Leston driving suit I was called a poseur,) we were otherwise as professional as possible. Most people took stimulants (Benzedrine was good, but Pat Moss’s horse pills seemed to be the best of all...) because they were still totally legal in those days – mine came from the family doctor on request. We all used marked maps with all the hazards and quirky details recorded, and a few of us (yes, I admit it, me too) would take spare weekends to go off to Wales or Derbyshire to explore the area and see which roads were ‘goers’ and which were not. Roads which had replaced disused railway lines (including tunnels) and the runways of redundant airfields were popular finds, while discovering that we were to use an Ordnance map which contained sizeable blank areas because they had once been secret military areas (Thetford Chase, anyone?) was truly daunting.
Even so, until the first of the Mini- Cooper S types or the Ford Cortina GTs came on the scene (the Knowldale crowd were the first to use them, of course!) it wasn’t high performance but experience which counted most of all. Unhappily that 'experience' sometimes helped a few (I dare not name them, but they know that I know) to cheat somewhat, demanding false times at time controls, interfering with time clocks by carrying spares to confuse the officials and even to cheat by going through 'black spot' areas on the maps in the hope that they would not be caught.
A few, just a few, eventually graduated to top-level Works teams – Roger Clark, Tony Ambrose, Vic Elford and Tony Fall among them – but as the great team boss at first BMC then Ford, Stuart Turner, once commented about most of the drivers: 'It was difficult to graduate from scratching round Welsh lanes in third gear to racing down the Turini in the Monte on sheet ice...'
The Motoring News era really came to an end in the early 1970s when the top drivers had all gone out and bought Escort RS1600s, fitted them up with quasi-racecar tyres which they often changed in the middle of the night, and would sometimes have illegally acquired pace notes for supposedly secret stages concealed about their person at scrutineering. That's gone now, all gone, and I still miss it.