Easter the first meeting of the season and you can guarantee it's going to be cold and windy but we started with a third place at the western area rally not a bad start bearing in mind Ken Bedford couldn't spare the time to practice. On to the Feltham rally and another third place. The next meeting is the London area rally and, yes you have guessed it, another third place. Still not too bad.

I collected the engines from the factory and was looking foreword to the Nationals the only time in the calendar all the teams make the effort to be there. Pilots who have packed up racing turn up to reminisce. After practice everything checked out and we had our first heat with a good time until the Germans raced. We watched them race and realised every model in the UK was now obsolete.

You can see in the photograph the Germans had a completely different approach to racing:

The model - the mono-wheel was set back on the centre of gravity, a nose whisker to act as a brake on landing, a fuel cut-off valve and the new Paul Bugl engine.

The method - one flick and away but instead of waiting for the fuel to run out to make a pit stop the Germans could choose when and where they made their pit stops. After tripping the fuel cut-off the landing had all the proprieties of a high speed crash! The model landed much faster then, at the last second, the pilot hitched the model on to the whisker to slow the model down, the fuel cut-off doubled for re-fuelling and priming the engine. This produced very fast times.