... and a shameful omission

Reading DSJ’s piece (Motor Sport, May 1989) about the mistakes made by journalists, the Editor was conscious that through a slip in concentration (those excuses again!) he had identified Mayman’s ERA as R5D instead of R4D in his stop-press VSCC Silverstone report, an error the race programme also perpetuated. He then turned happily to this report, to find that a line of his copy had been overlooked, thereby denying Bob Roberts’ game V12 Sunbeam “Tiger” its second place behind the Bequet-Delage in the Itala Trophy Race, omitting the gap between these two cars (36.2 seconds) and Boswell’s winning speed (77.08 mph), and wrongly promoting the Bugattis to second and third places.

While we are on errors, Enid Bagnold (Cars In Books) drove as a VAD in World War One, not in a mythical vehicle of these initials, and in the VSCC Light Car Trial it was Hill Six that was high in the Elan Valley, not the Scramble course, in case anyone thinks the author is going nuts.