The great party update
The Big Party at Gaydon in May
Spridget 50, a view from the car park
Thank you all, at least it looked as if it was all of you to me.
I firmly believe that the undoubted success of Spridget 50 (and yes what a success it was!) was due to the huge number of MASC members that rose to the bait. "Let's have the biggest collection of Spridgets ever" was the gauntlet Steve Clark threw down to the club at the AGM a year and a half ago and with your total enthusiasm that is what we did.
From the top, with a guarantee of centre page publicity in MASCOT from Barry and from your general air of "yes lets get on with it" I'm certain that the MASC contingent were the greatest percentage of 'members to participants' of any club involved.
The organising group from all five participating clubs met often to expand ideas and begin the actual planning, with different areas of expertise being taken up by the team.
Quite early on into the planning Steve Clark had to step down from the "chair" due to work changes and commitments. We all sidestepped taking up his mantle in favour of leaving Jeremy Cogman holding the reins. Which in retrospect was a very wise move, the event was tirelessly driven forward with Jeremy's enthusiasm and organisational skills to the result we all enjoyed on the 24th May.
I offered to be "Head Traffic Warden" and be responsible for safely getting the huge number of cars expected off the Warwick/Banbury road without traffic jams.
The plan I put together with the constant enthusiasm from John Bishop at the Events Organisers department at Gaydon seemed to go well, due in huge measure to the enthusiastic help of the volunteer marshalls. The wonderful signposting efforts of Andrew in Yorkshire had the desired effect and not once did we get hold ups outside the site.
From the early days when I measured the car parking available via Google earth mapping I wondered whether we'd get you all in, but a promise is a promise so we gathered as much grass parking as we could into the plan and pressed on.
The 24th was a tiring day for an old codger like me but at the end of it we on the steering group were very satisfied with what the five clubs had achieved together. Much of the day-to-day organisation drew on the skills of the admin team from the MGOC, under the guidance of Julie Neville, who worked tirelessly to keep us rolling along on the rails and helped me with building up the infrastructure on the weekend.
The Pride of Ownership and Concours competitions were ably policed by
mostly MGCC people and we dealt with much of the important "other stuff". Chris Jackson for instance dealt with the Regalia for the event. Jonathan Whitehouse-Bird did the majority of graphics tasks, designing the second batch of flyers, the Rally Plaques, the posters and the free programmes for the day, all along with getting his baby, EAO back to glorious life for the week. (The first Flyers were the work of Carlo la Duca and got the whole shebang off to a flying start)
AHC were able to bring along some very lovely historic Sprites and Midgets too, a great tribute to our marvellous cars.
This is starting to look like a "Thank you all" speech which it shouldn't so I wont DO any more of that.
On the Saturday morning we had a Green Innocenti Coupe waiting at the gates when I got there. Bill its pilot had come along all the way from the USA and later we had folks from Australia, France, Holland, Switzerland, Germany Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia amongst many others to join us and in general everyone behaved just as we marshalls asked them to with little dissention (we had a minor problem with a marshall sending a bloke in an MGB into the classic car park instead of letting him down on the arena. That wasn't the problem, it was in the ground rules, as I had specified in the briefing papers for marshalls. Mr Don Hayter was very understanding when I explained the reason for his diversion and then allowed him down to give the morning talk, which was very well received by all that attended!)
The only major exception to my rules was a chap in a Lotus that seemed to think his car was Spridget based enough to deserve entry. Me? I'm still not quite convinced but we did have enough room for him within the racing car area so I didn't pursue him when he slipped down the main road, Sprite Way.
In another incident, near the end of the day, I was disgusted to see someone having a moan at a MASC club officer. Not an appropriate time or place for such shenanigans in my opinion, everyone else was having fun!
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