Last-minute Entrant Wins Scottish Contesi
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Overall winner R. Hatley with his trophy.
FLAGS and bunting out everywhere; shops festooned whir flowers; pipe bands; a torchlight procession; all the fun of a huge fair; a round-the-town relay race; enough accordion-stirred reels to make the whole hillside shudder; and a fireworks display . . . seeing all this last Saturday in Bathgate, perched between Glasgow and Edinburgh, competitors for the Scottish Lorry Driver of the Year competition could be forgiven if they thought, as your reporter did, that this was the town's own way of welcoming the first such competition north of the border for six years.
It was, however, just a coincidence, which organizer J. 0, Hastie did not discover until two days before the event that the competition was staged on the same week-end as the Bathgate Procession and
Historical Pageant.
Nevertheless, it provided a rousing curtain raiser to Sunday's competition based on the British Motor Corporation (Scotland) Ltd. factory in the town.
For on Sunday, a day when showers and sunshine alternated with the rapidity of a .gear change, 93 vehicles of all sizes barring " box or tanker semi-trailers, tractive units over 4 tons" sorted themselves out in the space of seven and a quarter hours to produce a generally surprised and delighted overall winner.
In fact, when the marks were announced at the end of the tests, the eventual overall winner seemed to be out of the picture as runner-up in class G. Then a protest, which was upheld, revealed that A. Smith (Brownlee and Co.), driving a Bedford TK with 25-ft. trailer, had been wrongly entered in the " heavies " .class. His marks were transferred to his true class, F1, where he dropped to second place, leaving R. Halley (B.R.S. Grangemouth) with a Bristol to move to the leadership of Class G and so on to win the Scottish final.
He qualified for the final drive-off with the highest number of penalty points (295) of the nine who had to qualify (the tenth, J. M. Gardner. had 425 points, but had a walk-over to the final as the only entrant in his class, F2). And Hatley was asked to enter the competition only three days before the event when a driver entered from his Grangemouth depot withdrew.
The lowest individual score in the eliminating rounds came in Class B. Driving an Albion, R. Woods incurred 101 penalty points, but in a final reduced to two tests he hit a post on the first and lost 180 points. And although he had the second lowest number of penalties on the final manceuvre he plunged to eighth place overall.
Reversing into the bay was by far the worst executed of the tests, with four incurring 225 penalty points and several more with more than 200. Indeed, it was this section that cost A. Anderson (Brownlee and Co. Ltd.), in a class D Bedford, high honours. He incurred the lowest number of penalty points (nine) on the six and a half mile route test, and was second lowest on the first of the manceuvring tests, losing only five marks. Lowest on this was Woods with four penalty marks. But 109 on the second test, 220 on the third, and 10 earlier cyt the Highway Code set Anderson right back.
For the final, B.M.C. provided three five-ton drop-side trucks built and painted in the Bathgate factory for Austin Works use at 22 ft. 9 in. They were class D vehicles and. almost straight off the production line with less than a dozen miles apiece on the clock.
A. Nish (Montague Burton) was called home to Dumfries before he knew he had won hit class, and thus did.not contest the final., The Conunereial Motor man on the spot Made the draw for the drive-off and selected the order so that tension remained high to the last, for the eventual first, second and third were in the last four to drive and the winner was actually the last man off.
It was left to Halley, lying third at the end of the first section, to make a somewhat inspired two-handed lunge at the steering wheel while reversing with his door open and head inside to correct his line and park snugly in the bay to take the title.
"Examination nerves" troubled some drivers, including apparently Cpl. Sheila Awburn, a T.A. driver for 10 years, who found her 'first competition "very' frightening and nerve racking ", " The hardest section ", she said, " was kerb parking. If they had given me a bit more room I could have done it." There's a story ... but with 401 penalties she beat the only other woman competitor, also a W.R.A.C. girl, by 304 points. J.M.