PREPARING THE ROADBOOK

                -  by Hywel Thomas, Rally Secretary

This weekend, 15th & 16th July, I've been driven through all the Selectifs by John Morgan, the Joint Clerk of the Course, my job being to draw the tulip diagrams for the Roadbook.

Wow !!!  It's a tremendous route, with 20 Selectifs spread over three venues, all very close to the Rally HQ at Banwen Rugby Club. The heart of the rally is the famous Walters Motorsport venue, known to many Wales Rally GB competitors and spectators as "Walters Arena". As the crow flies, it's just ¼ mile from Rally HQ. The Arena itself is a mile of fabulous twisty gravel road around a lake, but there are innumerable other roads in this large exciting area, from rough muddy forest tracks used for training cross-country motorcyclists to wide smooth high-speed gravel roads used on major rallies - such as next weekend's Swansea Bay National Rally.

Fourteen of the Selectifs will be within the Walters complex, ranging in length from 3½ to 12 miles and using concrete, tar, smooth gravel, not-so-smooth gravel, and a few tracks. There are no "car breakers", and every test has been driven by a Vauxhall Nova without hitting its sumpguard once - mind you, the Turner boys may possibly be going a wee bit faster than our exploratory team.

The other two venues are an opencast site and a colliery. Don't worry, we won't be driving along the rough tracks through a working quarry, at both places we're using the tarred access roads. A colliery in south Wales? Yes, it's the only deep mine still working.

I can honestly say that I'm very impressed with the route that John Morgan and Roy Whitney have set out, and I know that you - our competitors - will think so too.

So, now it's back to the computer to convert some 50 A4 sheets of pencil diagrams into a Roadbook, using the same format as we've used the previous two years.

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