Filtrate Trophy Car Trial

Event Report

On day 2 of our North Yorkshire weekend we made a welcome return to the long established Filtrate Trophy trial from Ilkley & District MC, using their site at The Strid, Bolton Abbey in scenic Wharfedale. Once again we were blessed with amazing views from the upper reaches of the site, and even managed to pick up mobile ‘phone signals too! Another bone dry day beckoned with temperatures into the low 20’s again. The 22 starters were made up from a good number from the Saturday trial plus, for most of us, some new faces.

With Henry Kitching kept fully occupied as Clerk of the Course we now had the return of the cheeky blue Suzuki Alto with Rupert North at the helm to keep Trevor Moffatt honest and as anticipated these 2 were setting the benchmarks in Class 1. Rupert was switched on from the word go and secured a 4 point advantage over Trevor from 3 of the 8 hills over round 1 but the Corsa driver clawed those back and broke for lunch with a 2 point lead. Suitably nourished the 3rd round beckoned and Rupert snatched a single point back with once again 3 of the hills creating a disparity between the 2 drivers. This now had to play out over the last round and it was Rupert who amassed the optimum score, Trevor had a couple of hiccups and Rupert claimed the class win by 6 points with a very credible 46 over the day.

Class 2 entries included Ilkley’s star autotester Dave Mosey who was tutoring his son Joseph (on his second trial) in the refined art of car control. Within our championship it was another Simon, Neil and Paul contest. The Simon and Golf pairing took to the sections better than the Neil and Ignis pairing and with a 9 point advantage on round 1 Simon showed us all a dusty pair of heels, so to speak. We were neck and neck over round 2, albeit with some nip and tuck over the 8 hills. Nourished with a hamburger and cup of coffee, Neil pulled 5 back on the 3rd round and the last round was a similar outcome to R2 with the result that the class-winner’s goody bag loaded with local produce went to Simon. Meanwhile, Dave’s more powerful Corsa had the advantage over Paul’s Yugo 45, but Paul did match the score of local Leon Humphries, also in a Corsa, so not too discouraging.

Looking at the score sheet for Class 3 there are a tremendous number of cleaned hills and a good few cleaned the 2nd round. This all goes to show that there was going to be no room for error during the event. Setting the pace on round one was Ilkley club member Brian Colman (Dutton Phaeton) with a 7 picked up over 2 sections, Mark Hoppe (Dutton Melos) just a point adrift and Kevin Roberts (another Phaeton) another 3 back. On this round the Lieges of Barrie Parker and John Charles lost out on one more hill with John’s Suzuki engine model having the edge by 1 point. With the front-runners having clean sheets on round 2 we fast-forward to round 3 and find Barrie setting the pace with a modest 3, Brian 4 and Mark 6. Once again the final round was set to determine the class winner and maybe the winner on index. And so it was, with Mark and Brian handing in clean cards, the latter’s 50.5% being enough to take overall from Rupert’s 62.8%.

We thank Henry Kitching and Ilkley &DMC for extending their event to the two national car trials championships and we look forward to an opportunity to have a rematch next year!

NM