"Artie" Driver Wins at First Attempt
Page 51
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
COMPETING in a Lorry Driver of the Year contest for the first time, W. S. Smart, of Amey's Transport, Ltd., Oxford, won the City of Oxford Road Safety Organization's competition at the RAF. Station, Bicester, on Sunday. An equally unusual feature of his victory was that he drove an Austin-B.M.C. articulated outfit in the 27-ft. class.
A blustery wind, carrying more than a hint of rain, swept the airfield, as the first vehicles arrived at the end of the road section from the start on the Oxford By-pass. The high wind, of a perversity familiar to all who have served on flying fields, did nothing to ease the task of the marshals who were attempting to set up the barriers and poles to be used in the three driving tests. During the contest itself officials were kept briskly moving, restoring fences" and reinstating, rubber balls in pivoting cups, far more often than they were required to do by the competitors.
Nevertheless, the organization was perfectly capable of dealing with unexpected situations of this kind and the contest proceeded smoothly and reasonably rapidly. The spectators would, however, have benefited by more enterprising use of the public-address system: there is added interest in knowing when individuals faced with a final test have lost equal marks. With 39 marks lost, Smart was declared the outright winner, although three other drivers, B. Huckin, with 31+ penalties, S. G. Jenkins and A. R. D. Harbottle, with 32+ each, . all bettered his performance. The Oxford organization, however, calculated the winner on percentage improvement over the average for the class, an effort to compensate for variations in the entries for the different classes.
As is so often the case, both the road section and the Highway Code test produced their fair share of penalties. Smart lost 'five marks on the road, and a single mark for the Code, in addition to 33 in the tests. Huckin, lowest penalized of all, surprisingly forfeited nine marks on the road and two in the Code test. None of the class winners got through the road section unpenalized, •
Of the three tests, laid out on level tartnacadam, probably the last produced the biggest crop. of penalties. This was a manreuvre between two sets of fences, 10 ft. apart and staggered at a distance equal to the overall length of the vehicle. The secret lay in getting the near-side wing within a millimetre of the last marker pole of the second fence. Both Smart and Huck in (B.M.C. concrete mixer) achieved this: there were few others who did so.
Test j—reversing up to the near-side kerb—proved slightly less difficult in a length-and-a-half. Pluckin and Small, with a Shell-Mex and B.P. tanker, who had their " parallelism " right, were among the elect who lost no marks. Smart suffered a six-mark penalty here.
The second test—width judging and reversing through two gaps of the selected width—also proved extremely troublesome, and none of the class winners escaped scot-free. This is a test in which it pays to allow oneself a little more roorn for the forward drive than appears seemly, if only to make sure of the reverse manreuvre.
Drivers who made constant use of both their mirrors were at an advantage, but the second gate, on the start line, demanded a high degree of skill. Throughout the competition there was much of it to be appreciated.