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Further to my previous post about the first ever online post-meeting discussion, today is the anniversary of another event that in hindsight was something of a landmark. It was during a conversation on the bulletin board on Mike's F1 Stock Car Pages that someone asked if anyone would be able to make a note of the results at the upcoming meeting and send them in to another up and coming stox website. That site was Opposite Lock, and I obliged at the August Bank Holiday Sunday night meeting at Belle Vue. These were the days when your only options for finding out who'd won (apart from actually going!) were either a premium rate phone call to Stoxline, or waiting until you saw them in print in either Stoxworld or Stock Car mag. So I went to Belle Vue with notebook and pen, and carefully wrote down the results, and when I got home I typed them all out into an email. Later that same night, those results were published on Opposite Lock. That makes it the first ever F1 meeting to have results online the same day. At the time, Roger's Oval Racing Pages had already been around for a year or so and featured a wide range of mainly southern oval formulae, including results, although coverage of F1 was limited. It's possible that Roger had already had same day results for another formula, but this was definitely the first time that it had been done for an F1 meeting. That said, it was quite late, and probably not many saw it until the next day anyway! When we were talking about doing the results, I remember asking if I should do a bit of a meeting report as well... "Erm... nah, just the results will be fine, thanks!" I wrote one anyway, and it went online sometime the day after, while I was at Sheffield. From then until the end of the 2014 season, I went on to write a total of 174 meeting reports for various websites. Reading that first one back now, it's quite clear to me that I never got any better at it! Anyway, the first ever F1 results and meeting report to appear on the internet... BELLE VUE - Sunday 27th August 2000 Cars racing: 45 Driver of the Year Semi Final 1: 180,97,34,290,109,446,52,337,70,nof Driver of the Year Semi Final 2: 391,515,53,226,225,26,13,291,477,49 Heat 1: 383,225,140,226,13,75,137,76,70,477 Heat 2: 391,26,515,34,277,291,109,212,35,389 Consolation: 52,180,446,8,97,21,215,416,N28,49 Final: 21,34,446, rest TBA. There were 45 cars in the pits for the last Belle Vue of the season, including 4 of the overseas entrants for the World Final. They were Quentin Saayman (SA1) in the Richard Brighton car, Allen Woods (AUS1) in the old Mark Gilbank shale car, Scott Myers (NZ8) in the John Lund tarmac car, and Neil McCoard (NZ7) in the Chambers/Harrison car. All 4 were allowed a 10 lap practice before the meeting, and all looked reasonably competent. The meeting opened with the semi-finals for the Driver of the Year championship, which determine the grid positions for the Driver of the Year Final at Swindon on September 16th. The grids for the Semi-Finals were determined by points scored at all Startrax tracks so far this season. Ray Witts (180) started the first semi on pole and had little difficulty in a flag to flag victory. Mick Harris (8) gave Dave Johnson (383) a big hit in the early laps to take second place, but Johnson wasted no time in firing Harris into the pits bend fence. With Wainman and Smith on the front row of the second semi, and Lund on inside row 2, there was a feeling of World 1999 Revisited about this one. At the drop of the green, Wainman went into the lead. Early in the race, Lund moved Smith aside to take second, and caught Wainman. As the laps went by, Lund and Wainman pulled away from Smith, and it was starting to look as if Lund was going to settle for second; this was a Semi-Final after all! But at around the halfway stage, Lund went for the 515 back bumper going into turns 3&4. Wainman went wide, and got it half sideways coming out of the bend. Lund looked like he was going to dive through on the inside, but he backed off, and Wainman kept the lead. But with 4 to go, Lund performed the same manoeuvre again, and this time it paid off. Over the remaining laps, the 53 car pulled away slightly, and looked like Lund might actually record a first race victory in his latest car. However, entering the last turn of the last lap, Wainman took an almighty lunge at Lund, connected with the inside rear wheel of the 53 car, bounced off, and went backwards towards the fence. Wainman kept his foot on the gas, came out of the fence, and clobbered the now slow moving Lund car, half spinning it. And while all this was going on, Andy Smith came from a distant third place to take the flag. Wainman took second, and John Lund limped home in third. World 1999 revisited, or World 2000 preview? (In fact, if John Lund had been Bert Finnikin, Frankie Wainman had been Peter Falding, and Andy Smith had been John Lund, it would have almost been a replay of the 1991 World Final ...... almost!) It started raining just before Heat One, resulting in a slippery track. Quentin Saayman (SA1) races non-contact sprint cars in South Africa, and had a baptism of fire in what was probably his first race in a contact formula. He managed to collide with both the fence and other cars in equal measure, before bouncing off the fence and ending up facing the oncoming traffic. He was in the racing line on the entrance to turn 3, and the yellows were brought out to rescue him. Andy Robinson was in the lead at this point, but on the restart he lost his momentum, and Dave Johnson and Mark Clayton (225) got past him before the chequered. There was a torrential downpour at the start of Heat 2, which had turned to slight drizzle by the halfway stage. Wet weather expert Ray Williams led for much of the race, but as the rain slowed, so did Ray, and Andy Smith gradually caught and passed him. Martin Southwell (277) was initially given second place, but the results were later amended to place him fth. Craig Howarth (52) had no problems in the Consolation, although Ray Witts did get close in the closing stages. Scott Myers (NZ8) literally screamed round the track in this one, the Lund car making such a noise that we wondered if he had it in the right gear. It looked like we weren't alone in this, as after the race, the normally laid back John Lund was seen sprinting (yes, sprinting!) across the track to check on his car. No rain fell during the Final itself, but the track was still fairly wet from the earlier downpours. The cars were soon covered in shale, and the majority of cars span out at least once, making this a difficult race to lap score. Neil Shenton (35) led the early laps, in which Mark Gilbank (21) seemed to rediscover the aggressive streak that he's been sadly lacking so far this year, and planted Wainman hard into the 391 and 226 cars. Mark Clayton (225) then took a turn at the front. There was plenty of carnage on turns 3 and 4, which seemed to be a lot slippier than the other bend. Mal Brown took up the lead before the halfway,and led for much of the race. A race stoppage was called to remove bits of somebody's bumper andnerf rails from the track, and as they slowed down, Andy Smith tried to pass Dave Johnson on the inside. Johnson wasn't having any of this, and chopped Andy up, forcing him onto the infield. If Andy had been looking where he was going, instead of glaring at Dave, hed have seen the parked Stu Fellows car, which he ran into. (This was on the infield, and under waved yellows!). On the restart, Brown was still leading, with Mark Brightmore (477) second, Gilbank third, with several backmarkers between them. Brightmore found himself on the receiving end of a big hit from Frankie Wainman, which also took out Andy Robinson and Mark Webster. The net result was the 477 and 515 cars hitting the fence at speed, with the Wainman car looking like it might roll, before landing back on its wheels. A second caution was called when Dave Russo (49) and one of the overseas drivers (either SA1 or AUS1) tangled and went into the fence. In the closing laps, Gilbank lunged at Brown, spinning the 34 car, but losing time himself, which allowed Craig Howarth to take the lead. This was short lived, as Gilbank chased him down the back straight, and planted him firmly into the parked 477 car. Gilbank went on to take the flag, with Brown recovering for second. Such was the carnage throughout the race, the lap charts were re-checked 3 times before Gilbank was eventually confirmed as the winner. It was a further 15 minutes before second and third were confirmed as Mal Brown and Steve Booth, and I was probably in bed by the time theyd sorted the rest of the places.

Now open for your views and scores on the mid-week Skeggy shale session.... No, not really. It was 16 years ago! To the day. So, why am I mentioning it now? Well, the meeting at Skegness on Wednesday 2nd August 2000 has a kind of historical significance, in that it was the first meeting ever to be discussed on the internet. Stoxnet was still a few years away, but the turn of the millenium saw the emergence of a whole raft of stox based websites, all put together by enthusiastic fans. At the time, the internet itself was barely more sophisticated than teletext, and to say some of those early stox sites were "a bit basic" would be an understatement. But some were superb. One of the best was Mike's F1 Stock Car Pages, which had the web address f1stockcars.co.uk (no relation to the modern day F1StockCars.com). When Mike added what was then called a "bulletin board" to the site, it paved the way for online discussion of stock cars, and the rest is history. Mike's bulletin board hadn't been live all that long before somebody got home from the Wednesday night Skegness meeting and started a thread about it. I remember reading it at work early Thursday morning, a bit bleary eyed as I'd got home from Skeg in the early hours (back then, I was just about young enough for that sort of carry-on ) and then typing out a review/summary of the racing. Quite a few more did the same, and that was it.... the very first of what today we call the Driver Of The Day thread! There were no actual DOTD nominations or race ratings; they came along much later. But for the record... DOTD: 180 RR:8 There was no 'live' results, or results summary, or online meeting reports in those days either, but that's a story for another thread...