Mason's Motoring Mayhem by Tony Mason

Author:Tony Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Authobiography / Sport
Publisher: Veloce Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

The RAC Rally – the big one

As I write this, it is exactly 40 years since I experienced what is known as a life-changing moment. Those of you who have ploughed through the previous pages of ramblings will have gathered that I had enjoyed life, had a modicum of success, a lot of fun, and caused a bit of mayhem along the way. On the 5th December 1972, it all happened. I achieved the ambition of every rallyist in the British Isles by winning Britain’s biggest, most famous, and toughest rally – the RAC.

I’ve already mentioned the RAC Rally quite a lot, and you probably don’t need me to explain much more about the event that, over the years, had established itself as Britain’s toughest motoring challenge, Britain’s biggest single spectator attraction, and one of the world’s greatest rallies.

It all started way back in 1932, when Colonel Loughborough in a Lanchester (not Colonel Lanchester in a Loughborough, as erroneously stated by my fellow presenter Tiff Needell on Top Gear once) won the 1000-mile RAC Rally, decided by a series of tests on Torquay promenade. The good Colonel’s Lanchester had a fluid flywheel (whatever that is), which enabled him to drive slower than anyone else on one of the piffling promenade tests. He completed the 100-yard course at less than 1mph, so you could say he won the rally by being the slowest. I find that rather splendid.

The RAC Rally continued in a similar vein, with a number of starting points all over the country converging on a seaside town on the south coast of England, and more silly tests. Of course, all this so-called motorsport had to be suspended when World War II came along, but the RAC Rally resumed in 1951 with what was, effectively, another tour of Britain with a few slightly more competitive auto tests thrown in. It was won by two of the great names of rallying history, Ian and Pat Appleyard, in a Jaguar XK120. They came third the following year, and won again in 1953. Shortly after this, the event became tougher, with a considerable amount of map reading required, which, evidently, came as something of a shock to some competitors who arrived one year without the appropriate 1in Ordnance Survey maps.

The event improved bit by bit, but was still not popular with overseas drivers because of the night navigation sections between the tests. Something had to be done, so Jack Kemsley, a prominent member of the organising committee since the very first ‘Colonel Loughborough’ event, took charge and introduced the first special stages in 1960, as I’ve mentioned.

Fast forward to 1972. Things were a little different to those early rallies when Roger Clark and I won the event by nearly three-and-a-half minutes, beating 191 other cars into the bargain. My trip with Roger in a works Ford Escort was ten years after my first RAC Rally, and it was a storybook trip to be sure. There were 72 fast special stages to be attacked, and it was one of those few motorsport events where everything just ‘clicked.

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