Dastles and Westfields

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[ovaltrack]

Ben refers in a previous to the car that Trudy's brother has - I did not realise it is apparently the Indy Dastle - they are looking at restoring it so if anyone has pictures they can share that would be most helpful. I will also use the upcoming newsletter to ask for information.

[ezwalk43]

I was talking to Guy Smith (son of Gerald) at Beaulieu Autojumble the other day. As some of you possibly know he is a historic race car preparation specialist and always has some interesting Ford bits available on his stand. He is keen to restore the Indy car to the spec it was when his dad raced it in the late 80's but cannot find any photos from that era. He confirmed it was originally the Indy or Wedge Dastle which later passed to John Houghton. It was also at one time an autograss special and Guy has photos from that period but nothing from when Gerald raced it. By then it looked like a Mk7 Dastle but with the driver sat on the wrong side (ie inside the engine rather than on the outside) and I've seen pictures of cars like this from the early 70's but not from this period - Guy would really appreciate any help on this one. He tells me also that when he is selling in Europe he occasionally bumps into the sons of former european midget racers and finds it amusing to discover that they were at the same meetings back in the day. I also found a picture of a 70's John Houghton midget on Peter Perry's site which although a wedge is so far removed from the original Dastle it cannot possibly be the same car. So has anyone got any 80's photos?

[richyb66]

Coincidentally I was shown some photos last week by a friend that date from 1986 that show the car raced jointly by me (Richard Byrne 8) and my mate (Mark Brothwell 4).

We weren't very good but we had a right laugh and we only did one season beause we were both poorly paid apprentices at the time and racing was costly. We alternated driving between meetings which meant I got to drive at the World Final meeting when it was at Peterborough (sponsored by Verrolec if my memory serves me correctly).

While this may not be exactly relevant to the post, we bought the car off Pat French in Bristol and I'm pretty certain we sold it to Gerald Smith at the end of the 1986 season.

Pictures as follows:







This photo has Mark on the left, me on the right with shocking 80's big glasses and perm and mate Kelvin in the middle who sometimes provided a tow car and generally helped out.





I know that I've probably got some more pictures kicking around and if I can dig them out, I'll post them up.

[kiwikid34]

That's a great set of memorable pics from richy66. But I'm puzzled, as I am sure other piccy posters will be, how did you manage to get the whole lot in just the one post?
Everyone else seems to put photois on separately.

[richyb66]

You need to host the photos on a seperate website. I use Photobucket just because it works brilliantly. You set up a free account at www.photobucket.com and it allows you to upload photos from your pc to an album (or albums) on Photobucket.

Once you have your photos uploaded, you see the album as a load of thumbnail images. To link to an image, you move your mouse over it and a menu pops up. You're interested in the bottom option 'img code' so use you mouse to select all the text in the box to the right of this. Once you've got it selected (turns blue) copy it by either right clicking and using copy or CTRL+C

Now you just need to paste this link into your reply message box on this website (or any other forum etc). It will enter it as

{img}http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/blah/blah/filename.jpg{/IMG}

except the brackets around img at each end will be square not curly, I can't put square brackets here otherwise it will try to insert an image that doesn't exist.

You can put multiple images in one post and add text etc. between them. When you preview the post you'll see the image, not the image link.

Dead easy to do (easier to do than explain), works very well, free, no hassle. It's widely used and though I use photobucket, no doubt others similar are available.

[rodpashley]

The pace car has Ringwood Raceway across the windscreen, but it doesnt look like the ringwood that I know, where is it please?

[haflinger121]

Thanks for that explanation Richy. I have Image Shack set up on my PC from when we were first trying to post photos on here and were all having trouble making it work. But I don't think I've ever tried to get it to do that "multiple photos on one post" thing, maybe I'll give it a shot.

Thanks for posting those great pix. What I can't believe, is not the state of your glasses, but the state of that infield! Or perhaps I should say, ploughed field! Did it EVER look like that?! Hard to believe it today.

[haflinger121]

Hah! Just seen your post Rod! Yes, it is the same Matchams Park track, just in an era when Gerry Dommet (I think) had allowed it to fall into disrepair after Spedeworth got pushed out. The concrete jungle that is Ringwood today was largely created later by Reg Slack.

[ovaltrack]

Great pictures. 1986 is very sketchy in the history site so any further info you can add would be fantastic.

www.ovaltrack.co.uk/gpmidgets/tome/

Also I have just issued the third Midgets (Heritage-ish) newsletter of the year if anyone is interested.

[richyb66]

If info for 86 is so sketchy, I'll make an extra effort to dig out anything I've got. As I'm not to sure where's best to post it on here, would I be better e-mailing it to you at ovaltrack and maybe you can post the links here?

[rodpashley]

This car was later raced by David Hunt No 30, do you know who built it please?

[richyb66]

Sadly not - all I can vaguely remember was that Pat told me it had had a V8 in it at some time (though I struggle to see how it would have fitted) and he also mentioned Emery.

[rodpashley]

Thanks, My brother knows Pat French, I'll go that way. Emery built one with a V8 in it, you never know........