The third round of the ANCC championship was hosted by Lincs ROC at the showground at Manby, near Louth. This was the first time either me or Matthew had been to the site so we had no idea what to expect. We travelled down on the day before (Sunday), I towed the trailer with the lightweight on board and Matthew towed the caravan. We arrived mid afternoon and, after setting up the caravan and tents, we took the lightweight through scrutineering and went for a sedate drive round the course.
Manby is a disused air field so the off road area is largely man made with piles of earth dotted all around. Due to the dry spell we had been having the ground was rock hard and it seemed that every little bump was going to hurt. Navigation looked to be straight forward apart from the endless supply of artificial humps, some with minor drops on the other side and others with steep drops and turns - I was going to have to remember which was which, otherwise we risked damaging something... The first half of the course twisted and turned its way through these humps until we finally left the airfield and went into the farmers fields next door. The field part of the course consisted primarily of long straights with 90 degree bends at the end of each as we skirted around the crops. Some of the longer straights had small chicanes in them to make life a little more interesting.
Monday morning arrived and we attended the drivers briefing then watched the first motors tackle the first part of the course. This was quite fortunate as one of the first drivers had seen a quicker route that avoided two of the slower humps - we took note and decided to do the same... Finally we decided to give it a go so we lined up and away we went. The first run seemed to go well, as expected, the surface was very hard and I could feel my internal organs reorganising themselves as we crossed some of the rougher parts. Due to the vibration the map and notes were unreadable so I had to work from memory. Somehow we got round in a respectable time and things seemed to be working well. After the run we did a quick interview with a reporter from one of the off road magazines, the reporters parting shot being along the lines of - if you see a bloke with a big lens do something spectacular...
The second run went even better than the first. We started off thirty seconds behind the buggy that we had had the altercation with at Dunsville, when we caught them up in the field section I was on the horn nice and early and as we got closer to them they pulled over on one of the straights and let us through without any problems. We then overtook another Land Rover and were heading towards the last 180 before the finish. At the end of this 180 was another of the infamous humps and we had to turn left across it... unfortunately we were going too fast - Matthew tried to steer right to get off the hump safely but was too late. Apparently as we were on our way over I shouted at Matthew to kill the engine so, as he did so, there was just the sound of us crashing through the undergrowth. We came to a standstill with the Lightweight resting on it's roof and us hanging upside down in our seats wondering what would happen if we released our harnesses... Matthew released his first and managed to scramble out of his window and once he was clear I released my harness and fell in a heap on the roof/floor. After I had crawled out the Marshals arrived and we got a rope on to the motor to get it back onto its wheels again. We were soon strapped back in again and we set off to the finish to try and avoid losing any more time. We ended up losing about four minutes in total. I have no idea if the "bloke with the big lens" was any where near so I'll have to keep an eye out for the magazine in the shops.
The rest of the runs (six in total) went smoothly and we kept on the pace throughout and finished just over three minutes behind our class leader... we never managed to claw the four minutes back that we had lost on run two. As a result we have dropped down a couple of positions in the championship, we are now fourth overall and second in class with George Carruthers leading both our class and the championship. On the other hand out of the six possible events one has to be dropped so if things hold together and Matthew can avoid putting it on the roof again then we are still in with a fighting chance.