Chasing ‘The Circuit’ (Part 2)

There was no Circuit of Ireland in 1972 due to the Petrol Crisis, so ‘The Gang’ decamped to Donegal for Easter weekend and I’ll tell you about one of my most memorable experiences there, next time.

For 1973 BigT and I were recruited to Service an Escort Mexico that was to be driven by Richard Garrett, from Autoservice, and his friend Richard Finlay, from Belfast. The latter owned the very tidy purple car but they would take turns to drive the stages. Strictly speaking you weren’t supposed to do that, but running somewhere around No.100 it was unlikely that it’d be noticed and it wasn’t. We were supplied with a Minivan from the Finlay family business, to carry the bulk of the spares and tools, whilst Richard Finlay’s brother-in-law Ian would drive a chase car – a Capri I think – to leapfrog us and meet the rally car at the end of stages between our planned Service Points. The event started in Portrush, where the Finlays had a holiday home. Richard Garrett took us up to Belfast on the Thursday morning to collect the van and do the Service Schedule and then, back in Strabane, we loaded the rest of the tools from Autoservice on Friday morning and headed down to Portrush for the evening Start. It was only when we got there that we found out the whole Finlay family were going to follow the rally. There was eight or nine of them in three cars, including the chase car and we were all to stay in the Gleneagles Hotel in Killarney. So with a large house in Malone Park and that hotel bill, BigT and I reckoned the family business quite successful.

In servicing terms the event was uneventful because nothing broke on the car and the guys didn’t hit anything. So it was just fluids and spanner checks with a change of rear tyres, brake pads and shoes on Sunday evening, as I recall. That’s not to say that it was boring – far from it. With a schedule that had us meeting the car after every two or three stages adding up to around twenty points over the weekend we had an exhilarating, if sometimes hectic, time hustling the Minivan around the country. One advantage of the family entourage was the large picnic basket and primus stove being carried in the parents’ car. It met us several times each day to provide re-fuelling for ourselves meaning we didn’t have to stop off anywhere for grub n snacks, although we carried a fresh flask of tea at all times.

After five long enjoyable days we successfully arrived at the finish in Larne unscathed but without any silverware for the boys to take home. I was glad I’d booked the full week off work because I slept through the most of the Wednesday and then the night as well. The rally had taken its toll on a lot of the usual fancied front-runners and so had a surprise winner in Yorkshire dentist Jack Tordoff, co-driven by Phil Short, heralding the rise of the Porsche 911 as a potent force over the coming years.

Tordoff&Short

1974 saw us step up a level because Richard Garrett had left Autoservice and taken a job as Service Manager in the Ford Main Dealers in Derry – Desmond Motors. He’d bought a Mexico and persuaded his new employers that a sponsored attack on The Circuit would be good for business. Davy Hadden would co-drive and the garage supplied BigT and I with, a roof rack equipped, Mk3 Cortina 2-Litre Estate as a service barge. It was fitted with ‘assister springs’ on the rear which was a good job, because one of the conditions of this, Official Dealer Supported, effort was that we were to take two apprentice mechanics with us to learn ‘the servicing ropes’! The garage General Manager, Kevin Martin, would act as the chase car in his company supplied Granada Ghia Coupe accompanied by their chief mechanic and their wives, if I remember correctly.

CortinaGranada

I don’t actually remember where this event started, mainly because we didn’t go there. Whilst the event went well in respect of the mechanical reliability of the car, we did have to change the brake pads and shoes each day due to the boys slightly more aggressive driving styles and unseasonably hot weather. However, we did have a bit of extra work this time due to a tank-slapper for Garrett in the middle of Connemara somewhere, in the early hours of Saturday morning. This resulted in the back drivers’ corner smacking the scenery denting the panels, bending the bumper and smashing the tail-light cluster. There were bodywork damage penalties still being applied back then, so we had to get the car as straight as possible again before the finish in Newcastle on Tuesday afternoon. We took the bumper off and worked on straightening it at every opportunity, without much success initially. Finally we resorted to jacking the Cortina up and the lowering it down on the bumper that was sitting on two tool boxes – success. The rear panels proved a good bit easier to tease out, which the chief mechanic did without too much additional damage to the paint, somehow! The light cluster was a bit more of a problem because the body was smashed as well as the lenses. There was just enough of the red tail-light lens to tape over the bulb and keep the car legal, whilst the orange cellophane wrapper from a lucozade bottle taped over the bulb acted as an indicator light. Somewhere in Tipperary or Kilkenny on the Easter Monday we spotted a wrecked Escort lying on its side beside a small garage/shop. Inspection revealed that only the left tail-light cluster had survived whatever had befallen the car but we reckoned it would fit the right, upside-down. We explained our predicament to the proprietor and he let us have it for a couple of pounds, after we’d bought other stuff in the shop as well. We left the fitting of it until the final service before the finish – just in case!! The ‘apprentice training’ turned out a bit of a Curate’s Egg. The younger of the two couldn’t drive and proved to have no aptitude for map reading either but he was the better of the pair on the tools. The older one was still on his provisional licence and so the pace dropped considerably when he was driving, so we had to give that up. However, he did pick up the map reading quite quickly, but seemed unable to work quickly on the car. The biggest problem arose from both of them over-indulging in the pleasures of Killarney on an Easter weekend, resulting in them being totally useless on Easter Monday. In fact they just slept most of the day in the back of the car, only coming alive again at the Monday night supper halt. Once again we finished the event successfully, didn’t incur any extra penalties, but the chaps didn’t get on the Class podium this time either.

Whilst there wasn’t a lot for us to celebrate, Derry did have, because the event was won by Cahal Curley and Austin Fraser in their Porsche Carrera, with another local hero Ronnie McCartney partnered by, the previously mentioned, Peter Scott second in another Carrera. Having previously won Galway and Donegal, Curley and Fraser would go on to complete the Irish ‘Rallying Grand Slam’ over the next couple of years by winning the Cork 20 in ’75 and the first Ulster rally in ’76.

The small photos are from The Circuit ’74 and the main one is Curley and Fraser with the recently restored AUI 1500.

CurleyMcCartney

With no friends or connections scheduled to compete in 1975 a plan to follow the event and spectate was put together by Davy, Johnny Crosslé and myself. There are only a couple of clear memories from what I think was a fairly routine adventure. There was snow on good Friday and watching Cahal Curley squirm his way through an early stage in the Chequered Flag Lancia Stratos was a sight to behold. We didn’t see the car again because it broke down, as was its wont to do in these early years of its campaign. The rally was won by Billy Coleman, for the first time, in the very famous Works-loaned Escort 000 96 M (Seen here in its current restored condition in Roger Clark’s 1973 RAC livery – its first event). It was then used by Clark to contest the 1974 British Rally Championship, during which it won the Jim Clark and the Lindisfarne, but with Clark’s new Mk2 ‘Cossack’ Escort waiting in the wings the car was given to Coleman for the Easter weekend of ’75.

Stratos&OOO96M

One year on and we had the luxury of ‘The Big Red Racer’ with just Davy and I aboard. The crossroads in the middle of the Sally Gap, above Dublin, I’ve mentioned before and heading up there once again I snatched for a lower gear at one point and the gear lever came out in my hand – remember the Transit van load of frozen chickens in the middle of Limavady!!. We crawled on to the top and got the lever back in but it was obvious that the nylon retaining collar was badly worn. This would be the story of the rest of that Easter Saturday, with less and less force causing the lever to pop out. By the time we got to Killarney Davy was skilled at putting it back in while we were still on the move. With the gearstick issue getting worse and unable to find a suitable donor along the roadside, we decided to abandon the idea of flogging round the Ring of Kerry on the Sunday Run and after a good night sampling the craic of a Killarney Circuit Saturday night we reluctantly headed north on the main roads. Instead of heading home, after a meal in Sligo we headed up to north Donegal where we knew there was a Fleadh Cheoil taking place. To the uninitiated, these traditional Irish festivals provide good music and excellent craic washed down with a few bevvies, usually over a holiday weekend. We slept in the car the two nights and on Tuesday morning trundled back to meet up with the gang on the Butterlope stage near Donemana, about 10 miles from home. Billy Coleman won again, this time in the spectacular looking big-arched KHK 983 N Escort RS1800 with Russell Brookes the runner-up. But the talking point of the weekend was the performance of Will Sparrow, who finished 6th Overall in the Group1 DTV Firenza behind a pair of Porsches and rapid Swede Per-Inge Walfridsson in the Chequered Flag Stratos.

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A cousin of the brothers from whom I’d bought OZ’s and the Cooper wanted ‘A Circuit Experience’ and asked Davy and I to be his guides in 1977, as it were. He hired a Beetle from his local garage and with accommodation booked in Killarney we set off. We didn’t get that far, in relative terms or at least he and the Beetle didn’t. We headed to the Sally Gap crossroads party in the early hours of Saturday morning. I don’t recall the exact circumstances now, but Davy and I were dropped off near the top of the Gap and the cousin, his mate and the Beetle went off back down to do an errand for food, fuel or both, planning to come back and meet us. At some point later the mate arrived back to tell us that the Beetle had been rolled in to a field and wouldn’t be going any further. Fortunately, Davy and I had already met up with some of ‘The Gang’ from home who were travelling in a three car convoy. We were able to blag lifts with them and the stand-out memory from then on was repeatedly listening to “Pearl’s a Singer’ on the car radio for the rest of the weekend, because it was top of the Charts. I don’t remember anything of the rally itself because we were then on somebody else’s schedule, but we abandoned Killarney on the Saturday night and had a brilliant evening in the Kenmare Bay Hotel with a group called ‘The Bards’ who we knew and always had ‘Open Mic’ sessions during their gigs. Embarrassingly they’d always invite me to partake in this latter activity.

Will Sparrow would seal back-to-back Group 1 victories, this time in a 2-Litre Chrysler Avenger, whilst Brookes stepped up to win this one and would repeat the success the next year too, joining Coleman, Clark and Hopkirk as back-to-winners. Brian Culcheth in the ‘Little Magic’ Opel Kadette GTE starred in the Grp 1 fight, as part of his dominant Grp1 Championship year.

Having been married barely a month there would be no ‘Playing with Silly Rally Cars’, as my late mother-in-law termed it, in 1978. Anyway, as I recall Diana was working for at least a couple of the days of that Easter weekend. 1979 and the shoe was on the other foot because I had to work the Easter weekend, but we did manage to nip up to the Glendun/Orra Lodge junction on the Tuesday because we were living in Ballymoney by that time and it wasn’t very far. Five-year-old Richard however seemed more excited by the picnic Diana had prepared than the rally cars. There would be no ‘Circuit-watching’ at all in 1980 because I’d been in Stoke on induction training for my new job in Michelin for the first twelve weeks of the year and we opted for a caravan holiday in Portnoo instead. Both the following two years I had to work the Easter Shut-Down so again no Circuit, just some time with Diana’s parents in Portstewart. The next three Easters I joined crews from Mid-Antrim Motor Club to marshal at various local locations on various days, but I don’t remember any of the details. By then I was finding it difficult to chase and stand watching rally cars with the pressures of family, house purchase and work, so I drifted away from that aspect of the sport. In fact it would be the better part of twenty years before I’d return to The Circuit as a Time Control Official, then this past three years I’ve really enjoyed being a Re-Group Controller for the newly re-vitalised event.