Sand storming!
Alan Hughes remembers his days sand racing in the north west, and wonders if anyone knows why those meetings came to an end.
Iwas amused to see Pete Kelly’s reference to Dugdale’s of Alvanley in the February OBM .WhenIwas a youngster round the turn of the 1960s, we would go up there in search of bikes to ride around Frodsham Marsh; Hector Dugdale’s response to requests was invariably, “You want a big ‘un or a little ‘un?”, at which point he would emerge from the tin shed behind the showroom, dragging some unwanted trade-in, for which the going rate was usually 30 shillings.
His son Alan was a half-decent road racer and his other son, Hector Junior, rode a Yamaha-engined Bultaco on the beach, which leads me seamlessly on to my main topic!
Towards the end of 1967 my friend Graham Hilditch persuaded me that, as we lived within easy reach of Ainsdale and Wallasey, we should have a go at sand racing.
He had a suitable BSA and I sprang £7 10s on a Royal Enfield Bullet partly converted for trials. Another pound for a pair of secondhand scrambles tyres and we were all set for the ’68 season.
Taking to the sand
Unfortunately, one of the modifications to the Bullet was a larger rear sprocket, which did nothing for the already unimpressive top speed. Although stone reliable, the novelty of getting lapped soon palled and, in the mid-season break, I threw together a 500 Tribsa round a B31 frame and the wheels and forks from an Ariel VB outfit a friend had abandoned at the bottom of my father’s garden. While it was considerably quicker, it was far less reliable, with a propensity to stop suddenly at the furthest point of the course.
I rode this for the rest of 1968 and into
’69, until a difference of opinion with some excavations on the then under construction Runcorn Expressway on my road Tribsa put me in Warrington Infirmary when I should have been in the Island for TT week.
I finished the season on the 500 and over the winter fitted the 650 motor from my written-off road bike. At last I had a reasonably competitive mount and, although I never won a race on it, I got a few seconds and thirds (and, more importantly, my name in the results in Motor Cycle News!). By this time grass track frames were becoming more common on the beach and a meeting on a borrowed Elstar in 1972 convinced me that this was the way to go.
In the summer of 1973, my wife and I trekked to the Forest of Dean in our ancient
Austin A30 to collect a Bewley grass frame from Selwyn Perry. A couple of weekends in the workshop of Colin Rides in Widnes saw this modified to take a Gold Star rear wheel and gearbox, and a twin-carb T100 motor.
Initially the forks were the Bullet legs in Bantam yokes, but, with this set-up, high speed navigation could best be described as “approximate” and I fitted a set from a BSA C15. I rode this bike at Wallasey, Ainsdale and Port Talbot until the end of 1978 when domestic circumstances persuaded me to call it a day.
What happened to the beach races?
Apart from a very brief foray into pre-65 trials in 1985, that was the end of my competition career. Graham, who started me off on this, had moved on to sidecar road racing, gaining high placings in the TT in the late 1970s. A growing family and a nasty crash at Cadwell Park ended his circuit career but he continued riding and winning in hillclimbs and Thundersprints until his sudden, untimely death in 2016.
The point of all this is to ask if anyone among the knowledgeable OBM readership can tell me when sand racing ended on the Mersey coast. I was told by someone that it was killed off by the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 20 years ago, but this seems unlikely and I have never been able to confirm or deny it. The promoting clubs were the Wirral 100, the Mersey and the South Liverpool: do any members or former members have any recollections?