History
The site was launched in April 2007 to provide an online focus for everyone interested in the history of classic trials – one of the oldest forms of motorsport in the UK. The initial content was based on the vast quantity of literature, photographs, and movies that I’d acquired during the course of my research into classic trials sections, combined with a lot of more recent material from my Marlin-focused Section Begins website.
The site was redesigned in 2009-10 but, by early 2015, the redesign was looking a little tired and, more critically, was not “mobile-friendly”. I was also getting over-whelmed with the quantity of information I was receiving in my quest for the site to be “The complete history of classic trials”. So, in autumn 2015, I took a critical look at the content and decided to re-focus the site on my two main interests – the When (the Trials) and the Where (the Sections), and to leave the Who (the People), and the What (the Cars), to others.
David Haizelden’s Covid Lockdown initiative (2020-21) to get the results of every ACTC Championship event (right back to 1984) published on the ACTC website enabled me to get my Trials Sections Database as up-to-date as possible for all the major sections and I turned my attention to researching what I refer to as trialling’s Middle Ages (or even Dark Ages) – the period from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the formation of the ACTC in 1979. The long-term intention is to write a book covering the complete history of classic trialling from 1900 to 2020, but the periods up to 1939 and from 1979 onwards should (I hope) be a piece-of-cake compared with the Dark Ages. I am therefore re-focusing the content of this website, once again, to concentrate more on the miscellaneous nuggets of information from my recent research which may, eventually, make it into the book.
Content
- Posts (Visible on the Home Page and also accessible via the Post Categories link in the header menu). Topical content, correct at the posting date shown, but not, in general, maintained and updated.
- Pages (Accessible via the Pages link in the header menu). Content which is maintained and updated on a regular (but not always frequent) basis. The date of the most recent update is shown at the end of each Page.
Acknowledgements (to be updated)
Whilst carrying out the research for this site I’ve had an immense amount of help and encouragement from those with a similar interest. So here they all are, in alphabetical order:
David Alderson, Dick Andrews, Dave Anscombe, Peter Barlow, Kevin Barnes, Jane Bowen, Nigel Brown, Colin Butchers, Mike Dalby, Ian Davis, Bryan Ditchman, Jonathan Elliott, Nick Feakes (MMM Register), Anthony Forshaw, Brian Gray, Martyn Halliday, Pete Hart, Mike Hayward, Peter James, Michael Leete, John McGibbon, Mark Milne, Adele Pentony Graham, John Reid, Denis Roffey, Roger Stanbury, John Sutton, Roger Thomas, Jonathan Toulmin, Stuart Ulph, Arthur Vowden, Dave Wall, Jon Way, Simon Woodall, and Nick Woollett.
Page updated : 28 December 2021