Category: Website Updates

As many of you will know, ACTC Chairman Dave Haizelden and ACTC Website Supremo James Shallcross have been updating the Events section of the ACTC Website to include one-page-per-year going right back to the start of the ACTC Championship in 1984, and earlier. Each page lists the dates, where known, of both the Championship and non-Championship events, and the intention is to publish as many of the Results Sheets as can be dug-out of competitors’ garages, lofts, and storage boxes.

The Coronavirus Lockdown has provided a good excuse for competitors to spend their time doing that digging-out and the number of Results Sheets available on the ACTC Website is now truly remarkable.

As well as providing Dave and James with a lot of the dates, and some of the results sheets, I have been working on a parallel exercise and can now publish my Trials Events Database. As ever, this is work-in-progress and I will be republishing the printout on a regular basis.

I have also updated, and republished, all the events pages on this website – see the pull-down menu under ‘The When’ above – but I have had to remove the spreadsheets which listed which sections were used for which year of each event. I have added so much information to these spreadsheets over the last few months that they have become far too large for sensible publication. As an example, the spreadsheets for each of the three MCC events now list 100+ sections over 100+ years – that’s a big spreadsheet!

Another ‘work in progress’ update. The first, I suspect, of many during the Coronavirus ‘lockdown’. See Trials Sections Database page.

I have made some minor changes to the Trials Sections Database page and published an updated printout from the Database – all 32 pages and 1150+ sections of it. Those familiar with this ridiculously ambitious project will notice few changes to the published data, although this is now displayed in a new format. I still have a LOT of information to add, and there are still a large number of inconsistencies to be ironed-out but, step-by-step, is slowly getting-there.

Update 6 September 2019 09:00:

Minor updates to both page and printout.

A few new bits and pieces of information plus a re-formatting to, I hope, make for easier online reading. See more on the Troll T6 page.

Thanks to Arthur Vowden, I’ve managed to unravel the early history of Restart magazine and have updated the Magazines page accordingly.

Thanks to Mike Ellis, I’ve made yet more updates to the Troll T6 page, although this is now becoming a bit too long for easy reading and I may have to consider splitting it in the future.

Lots of minor updates and tweaks, too numerous to list individually here, to the How One became Three page. Go have a look!

I’ve just (at last!) updated the Troll T6 page to record the Selwood Family’s purchase of T6e/17 from Lee and Danni Dove.

The more observant of you will have noticed that, together with the hosting changes described in the previous posting, the site’s tagline has changed from “The Where and When of Classic Trials” to “The When and Where of Classic Trials”. This reflects a subtle change in the bias of my trials-history-related research.

Although making the Trials Sections Database as comprehensive as possible is still my ultimate goal, I now think that this will be more easily achieved by concentrating, first, on the trials themselves, then moving-on to the sections used for those trials.

I have therefore created a new Events Database which currently holds the dates of nearly 800 trials from the earliest MCC events (remember the first ‘Edinburgh’ was held in 1904) to the present day. This database is split into two parts – up to and including 1983, and 1984 onwards – to reflect the start of the ACTC Championships in 1984.

Up to 1983 I add events on an ad-hoc basis but with no intention (life is far too short) of trying to make the list comprehensive. From 1984 onwards my magazine collection should allow me to create a comprehensive record of every event in the ACTC Calendar, whether part of the ACTC Championship or not. I’m currently adding events from the 1980s and 1990s and will make the complete list available on this website as soon as I believe it to be worth publishing.

I’ve recently moved this site from a WordPress.Com website to a self-hosted WordPress.Org website. Although the site looks much the same at the moment, minus the annoying pop-up ads which are now ubiquitous for WordPress.Com sites, it will allow for more flexibility in the future.

Although I’ve moved all the pages from the previous site, essentially unchanged, I will be doing some consolidation, tidying-up, and adding a few new pages, over the next two to three weeks.

I’ve also, finally, started wading through the mountain of unactioned trials-history-related emails received over more years than I care to admit. These emails have unearthed some interesting items which don’t justify a page on this website but might justify a blog posting, so I’ve moved the blog posts to the front page of the site to make these future posts more visible.

I’ve just republished my Register of trials-prepared Marlins, with updates to six of the cars listed. The Register is linked from the Marlin Roadster page – scroll to the bottom of the page. Any more comments/ updates gratefully received.