Crowds flock to motoring festival

Now as in 1902 the weather played Bank Holiday tricks on the organisers of the Bexhill 100 Festival of Motoring.

But with a cavalcade of motoring history dating back not one century but TWO, nothing could stop the 2002 festival being a crowd-pulling spectacular success.

Heralded by bagpipers and sounding like a miniature locomotive, the town's replica of the 1902 event-winning Serpollet "Easter Egg" had pride of place in the opening parade.

Rother chairman Cllr Bill Clements was unwell and denied the honour of opening Sunday's programme. But Rother leader Cllr Graham Gubby told an estimated 30,000 first-day crowd: "Bill is a big supporter of the Bexhill 100 and a big supporter of Bexhill.

"He wishes everyone well and hopes that this will be a tremendous weekend."

And a tremendous weekend it was.

The Serpollet was not the oldest embodiment of steam as motive power to take to De La Warr Parade, scene of the 1902 trials.

Ruth Brogden was posing in period costume in The Enterprise, her husband Tom's replica of pioneer Walter Hancock's 1833 steam carriage.

Meanwhile, also in costume, Tom was stoking the boiler of an evocation of an even older machine, Richard Trevithick's incredible London Steam Carriage. Driver George Grindey eventually manoeuvred the unwieldy beast out on to the track to the amazement of the crowds.

Tom said: "Trevithick was a Cornish mining engineer. He built the original steam carriage in 1803 - 25 years before Stevenson's Rocket took to the rails."

The carriage sits perched atop wheels of eight feet diameter and is incapable of climbing hills - or descending them. It was not a success.

So why replicate it?

"It was the first 'people carrier.' It was the first motorised vehicle."

Like every Bexhill 100, the weekend brought a bewildering variety of vehicles - from the wartime Quad tractor which pulled the 25pdr howitzer to the post-war Messerschmitt bubble car; from the Corgi folding scooter developed for air-dropping to parachutists to dragsters of mind-blowing power.

Darryl Bradford is arguably Bexhill's fastest driver. He has just graduated to drag-racing's ultimate league, "top fuel."

It is a number-crunching section of motorsport which defies belief.

His Megabowl-sponsored monster cost 100,000. Each blast up the drag strip's quarter-mile costs 2,000 and gulps 18 gallons of fuel - at 40 a gallon.

A pair of rear slicks cost 1,000 and can last five runs - or one.

With 6,000bhp under his racing boot from the dragster's 500cu. in supercharged V8 Darryl couldn't contemplate even a brief burst off the De La Warr Parade start-line.

"If that clutch locked I'd end up in Hastings..!"

Thanks to the Megabowl, MT Drains, Wilson's Restaurant of Little Common and White Contracts, Darryl is making an impact on the drag-racing scene.

"Last year was my first in the methanol division and I came fourth in the British Championship having never driven in it before.

"Now I have stepped up to the ultimate, top fuel. Each cylinder of this car develops as much power as a Formula One engine."

At the opposite end of the scale, the Observer found six year-old Katie Butterworth of St Leonards sitting astride a diminutive Gilera DNA on the Phoenix Motorcycles stand.

Helicopter ace Dennis Kenyon threw his Schweitzer around the sky to the delight of the vast crowd. Russ Swift lived up to his name - and to his reputation as the nation's champion in the art of sliding a speeding car into a tight parking spot sideways.

The 2002 Bexhill 100 Festival of Motoring was a vintage event in every sense of the term.