Ross & District Motor Sports Club have recently run, for the 35th time, the Kyrle Classic Car Trial. The trial covered a route of around 60 miles in the Wye Valley and Forest of Dean and 16 sections of hills were set out on private and Forestry Commission land.

The Kyrle Trial is a round of the National Classic Trial's Championship and a good entry of 59 cars was received. Drivers came from all over England, from as far away as Yorkshire, Kent and Cornwall. One driver had even been trialing in Scotland on the Saturday before driving south to Ross-on-Wye to compete in the Kyrle Trial.

For the past few years the Kyrle Trial has suffered from very dry weather, but not this year, rain for most of the preceding week and sunshine on the day made ideal trialing conditions. There was plenty of mud in places and all the hills were slippery.

Clerk of the Course Derek Tyler used all his skills to set out a very challenging course on which the overall winner only dropped just one mark but the last man home dropped 169 marks. Derek had found some new sections and had made some interesting changes to some of the regular sections.

Overall winner was Simon Groves from Bodmin driving a Troll and passengered by his father John who had actually purchased the Troll kit some 25 years ago. The build of the car was only completed last year; it takes time to build a good trials car!

Class 3 for conventional saloon cars was won by Paul Bartleman from Ledbury, in a Ford Escort. Paul only dropped 12 marks, a performance that embarrassed many of the specials and won seventh place overall.

Rob Baldwin of Hereford made a return to trialing after a lay off of many, many years in a Liege Sports kit car. This pretty little car has a small engine and Rob did say he needed a bit more 'grunt'.

The best performance by a Ross club member went to Adrian Marfell driving his self prepared big engined Volkswagen Beetle. Adrian is well known in the trials' world for his well prepared Beetles.

To run an event such as the Kyrle Trial requires lots of marshals and joint Chief Marshals, Tom Baker and Glenn Morgan had done a magnificent job in getting more than 80 people to sign on as marshals.

On a beautiful warm sunny day all the competitors, marshals and spectators enjoyed the trial as well as the Wye Valley and Forest of Dean.