Editor's Ramblings

The electronic side of Southern continues to flourish, with Tim Hines getting a steady hit rate on the club Internet pages. We are also starting to get interesting feedback - one person wrote in to ask for more competitor round-up information. And a couple of weeks ago I received an email from Michael Fawkes in Australia who had read that I had been out on an event with Justin Northage. He wondered if it was the same Justin he had lost touch with after his move to England. It was! We now get around 200-250 "hits" per week on our Web pages, quite a lot of them looking at past magazine articles as well as coming in through the main club pages. Recent hits have been registered from Portugal, Finland and Switzerland as well as Australia - we are a truly international car club! We owe a big vote of thanks to Engineering Dynamics who give us room to run our pages on their Internet site.

Now we all know that co-drivers can't win rallies, they can only lose them. A comment in the crew-by-crew roundup of a major rally recently brought this home once again. Names removed to protect the guilty (and because it could happen to any of us) the article reads "They would have won the Gold Star category by nine seconds had the co-driver not miscalculated his arrival time at first service and booked in eight minutes early as well as falling foul of the ¾ rule to earn a massive 38 minute road penalty. Overall 93rd (last but one)." Ouch!

To add to the comments elsewhere in the magazine, I remind you of the AGM on September 8th. If you would like to offer to stand for a committee post, INCLUDING MAGAZINE EDITOR - no post is excluded and we could all do with a change, contact Paul Smith or Rick Smith. We are genuinely interested in getting some new blood and new ideas onto the committee so please do apply. Even if you can't face a measly 12 committee meetings, come along to the AGM anyway and see the faces behind the names.

That's all from me...