Thursday, 30 January 2020

Rally - A nostalgic tale


I don’t know if many of you managed to read that press clipping from the 1972 Jim Clark Rally in Motoring News as featured in the previous post, but it contained a wee gem of a story. Crucially, not the whole story. It concerned the fate of Valerie Carlaw who was being navigated by one Johnstone Syer Esq and who incidentally later became Andrew Cowan’s regular navigator.

On Stage 7, Valerie was caught out by a yumpy straight on the Falstone test and rolled her Cooper S four times. She didn’t finish the rally.

However, what the MN reporter failed to record in his report was the brief conversation that ensued at the outset of this incident. Apparently as the Cooper S left the road, dug its nose into the turf and started rolling, Valerie was heard to utter: “Oh, f*ck me!”

To which came the considered and laconic retort from the left hand seat: “Can ye no wait till the car stops rolling?”

Makes you wonder if we’d get away with reporting such intimate conversations these days, eh?

No comments:

Post a Comment