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Carrera Lockdown - 13 to 16 April 2020
2020
– this was to be the year to get out and do tours –
many were planned,
kicking off with the Argyll Classic on 29th March, the HCC Spring Tour,
Drive It Day, the Red Hackle ….. etc. etc. – the
list goes on. Car all
prepped, accommodation booked, and then – a few Chinese folk
with a
cough developed into a global pandemic and suddenly – all
motorsport,
competition and tours – CANCELLED!!! So what to do?
Mags
Campbell came up with idea of a virtual tour – brilliant!,
but how
could we run it? We put our heads together and came up with a plan
– a
kind of table-top treasure hunt using maps and a route supplied by the
organisers to the participants, and questions about the route, the
places on or near the route and other little tricky tests to exercise
the grey matter of the crews. We would send out a day’s route
and
questions each day for 4 days and get the answers back on day 5 to give
them a bit of time. Awards would be in the form of a Gold, Silver or
Bronze certificate, depending on the number of points scored. The
overall winner would get a special award of something
“real”.
Just
to make things interesting we asked the entrants to tell us which
“virtual” car they would like to enter in, although
they could enter in
their own car. The idea was to let people’s imagination run
riot as to
what can they would love to use, regardless of expense, rarity etc. At
the end of the event there was to be a “Concours
d’Elegance” where
fellow entrants could pick the virtual Car of the Event.
So
dates were decided and we asked entries to be in by 10th April via the
CCHMSC web site. Mags was the chief administrator or Secretary of the
Event taking the entries, making up the entry list and dealing with all
the emails, and Dave was the route planner – doing the maps
and setting
the questions.
We expected maybe half a dozen
entries as we
didn’t know how this type of event would go down - by the
closing date
we had over 30, and being generous we accepted a few late entries to
end up with 35. The great surprise was where they came from –
not only
our own Scottish lot, but entries from all over England, Northern
Ireland and even France and Italy!!
So, to the
event. On Monday
13th April, the 2 maps and questions covering day 1 were sent out. The
route started at the Broxden Roundabout, Perth and heading initially
west then turned north towards Glen Almond and the Sma’ Glen
and over
Glen Quaich to Kenmore and Tummel Bridge, then east to Pitlochry and
over the hills to Kirkmichael. From here we headed towards Glenisla and
bypassing Kirriemuir, looped back round to the first overnight at
Forfar. The first day questions were reasonably easy just to ease the
participants into the event – nothing that couldn’t
be found out with
Google Maps and Wikipedia.
Day 2 kicked off heading
north east
towards Brechin then north via Edzell, Fettercairn and the Cairn
o’Mount. A question on the height above sea level of the
summit of
Cairn o’Mount caught out a few. From here it was
across-country via
Torphins to the A944 and Alford. Questions about the Transport Museum
didn’t seem to cause any problems. Then it was on to the
overnight in
Huntly with a question about the overall distance of the day in yards
catching out one or two.
Day 3 started with a simple
navigation
test with 5 “tulip” diagrams giving the route.
Reference to Street View
in Google Maps gave the answers to filling in the blanks on the sign
posts at each of the junctions – should have been VERY
simple, but some
still got it wrong! A trick question about the number of public phone
boxes that were passed even tricked the route organiser. One phone box
shown on the map was actually off-route so didn’t count,
however a
virtual drive-through the route on Street View showed an old red phone
box in a garden. But that didn’t count either as it
wasn’t a “public”
phone box – so the outcome – NO public phone boxes.
Confused me – and a
few others too.
From the end of the tulip section the route
turned
south west heading into Speyside and distillery country with a couple
of distillery related questions thrown in. Overnight was at Grantown on
Spey.
Next day – and the last one
– continued south west from
Grantown passing the Strathspey Railway and Broomhill Railway Station.
The question about its alternative name threw quite a lot of people
–
did they never watch “Monarch of the Glen”? It was,
of course
Glenbogle. Maybe they didn’t get the programme in Italy!!
Another
question that confused a few was the interior décor of the
public
toilet at Laggan. A bit of ferreting about on Google Maps would have
shown a photo of the beautiful pinkish red interior. From Dalwhinnie
the questions on the route consisted of working out the shortest route
back to the finish at Broxden Roundabout via 3 intermediate waypoints.
It was actually reasonably easy with the aid of Google Maps, with only
one slightly tricky distance.
So how did the crews
perform?
The answer sheets were all sent in on time and marked (with a good bit
of leniency!) – the results were quite surprising. No-one
scored a
perfect 40, the highest score being 36 from Barry and Helen Stewart in
the 1959 Lotus 7, taking a Gold certificate and the overall
winners’
award of engraved glasses.
In all there were 4
Golds, scoring 36 or
above (for the purposes of the awards half points were rounded up)
including the winners, 15 Silvers (31-35 points) and 15 Bronzes (up to
30 points), with 1 retirement, being that of Charlie and Susan
Donaldson supposedly with “overheating” –
What of – the brain? – the
computer???
The Italian crews did particularly
well with 3 Silver and
one Gold award. Anyway congratulations to all.
The
award certificates
were sent out by email on Sunday 19th April. The Concours
d’Elegance
was voted on by most crews and the outright winner was the magnificent
1936 MG SA of Roddy and Sylvia Main. Apparently this car was chosen
because Roddy remembers his uncle having one many years ago and being
extremely impressed by it.
|
 
|
So that was the
Club’s first ever
virtual tour – but maybe not the last? Amazingly enough in
the last few
days Mags and Dave received emails from Italy with details of a very
similar event being run by the Club dei Venti all’Ora of
Trieste, they
say “inspired” by our event – so you
never know these types of event my
go “viral” – but not like Corona Virus we
hope!! Full Details |
| Updated 4 May 2020
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