It’s amazing who you bump into at the CV Show. There I was
surrounded by trucks and trailers, vans and telematics, and I was accosted by one Neil
MacKinnon Esq. The 12 times winner of the Tour of Mull Rally was down looking
at trailers. No, not a new rally car trailer, he s looking for a 16 wheel low
loader to transport wood cutting machinery on contract work into and out of the
forests.
Maintaining the Mull connection was John MacCrone. His Ford
Fiesta R2 was on the Palletforce stand purely as an attraction, but there was
something else on the stand that raised a bit of interest, a commercial tyre
for truck trailers with the name DMack on it.
As we all know in rallying circles, DMack is the trade name
for Dick Cormack’s new rally tyre venture with which he is servicing teams from
the WRC all the way down to the British Rally Championship and all the way up
to the Scottish Rally Championship, but this was a first, truck tyres.
Apparently Dick has arranged with the Palletforce to design and
manufacture a tyre for truck trailers and the tyre also features the
Palletforce name on it.
Another treat was bumping into Paddy Hopkirk. He was at the
show on business and nothing to do with motorsport. It’s his company McGard
which makes the locking wheel nuts for all Ford alloy wheels and he does BMW
plus many other manufacturers as well.
Paddy was also wondering what has gone wrong with rallying
these days. He had to attend a business meeting in France a couple of months
back just after the Monte Carlo Rally and thought he had better swot up on who
had done what on the rally. He could find no information in the daily press (the
broadsheets) and heard nothing on the radio on either Five Live or Talksport.
Which made him wonder just what has gone wrong with the
promotion of the sport and the lack of press interest. He also reckons that’s
why Kris Meeke is out of a drive and Prodrive is out of running a works team.
The budgets are horrendous and the returns are questionable.
Amen to that.
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