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  1. I no longer live in my home town of Bury St Edmunds, having moved to away to go to university 25 years ago and mostly lived elsewhere ever since. I still visit my parents there as often as I can and whenever I do I always try and visit Model Junction, the excellent Local Model Shop, even if it's only for a chat. My Dad still visits there regularly, though, as he is building a model railway in his retirement. On a recent visit, David the co-proprietor said he had something for him. David has been working in the shop since I was racing regularly back in my teens and my Dad was my mechanic, and lo and behold, he had a picture from those days which showed me and some other racers at a charity presentation. It is dated 9th September 1992 and is taken in the area where we usually held our races, a stretch of open grass wedged between the local sports centre (out of shot to the right), the sports centre 5-a-side football pitches (behind the photographer here) and the sports centre car park (on the other side of the hedge behind the caravan). I am the ungainly youth in the light-coloured shirt with the no 87 Mid kneeling in the front row. I don't remember the names of most of the other people in the shot except the chap holding the Toyota pick-up, who was David's predecessor as Model Junction's owner and who I think was called Colin. Next to him with the moustache is Ian, the race controller from our Saturday morning meetings. He started out doing race control exclusively, as it was a very intensive process involving a lot of manual counters, and totalling of laps and compilation of finals by hand. Later he trusted some of the rest of us with race control duties and was able to take a race off every round to have a go himself with a demilitarised Fast Attack Vehicle. I cannot be sure, but I think the embarrassed-looking chap in the back row with the black sweater and the red Cat may be William Mitcham, the Bury Buggy Club driver who ended up reaching the final of one of the IFMAR Worlds. The BBC was a separate entity to the MJ Saturday meetings. They were a proper club with organised membership, computer race control and a permanent circuit in the village of Shimpling just outside Bury, where they raced on Sunday mornings. There was some crossover and a lot of the MJ Saturday crowd were also BBC members, as shown by the fact that the 87 on my car is my BBC racing number – Ian would have made me cover up one of the digits for Saturday racing so it just said 7 or 8, as 87 had too many syllables to be shouted constantly by the manual counters. There was no membership as such for the Model Junction club, and anyone could walk up on the day, pay a small fee and race. The weekly results were compiled up dilligently by Ian, though, and two championships were awarded per year: the summer off-road series and a winter tarmac series which took place on the car park when the weather made racing every week on the grass impossible. I was lucky enough to win the summer series twice (89 and 92), but never really got the hang of the rough tarmac in the cold car park. The track for the Model Junction meetings was made up anew early every Saturday morning by Ian out of rubber pipe, rope, tyres and whatever else came to hand (for a while the off-road circuit regularly featured a jump on the main straight made out of an old road sign). The fact that it was dreamed up by Ian every week meant that you never knew when you arrived what the track layout was going to be or whether the potholes (which remained static) would be in the middle of the main straight or on the apex of a hairpin. Its portability also meant that it could be packed up and used in different locations, which was a great promotional tool for the shop. As a result we frequently found ourselves racing at village fetes and similar events, including on one memorable occasion on the lawn of Gedding Hall, the country house of former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman. We ripped it up quite badly, as I recall, but he seemed alright about it. Our prizes that day were presented by car transporter magnate and former F1 proprietor Ted Toleman. I am not sure what the presentation here was for. The fact that William Mitcham is there means that it might have been related to a charity non-stop 24hr team race which Model Junction organised and supplied the equipment for – stock Tamiya Falcons – and which he legendarily won almost single-handed. One of the cars involved remained on display in the shop for some time, complete with war wounds and patina, as an example of the durability of Tamiya's products. We weren't really involved with that, though, so it may have been something entirely different. The fact that Mr Mitcham might be in the shot means it was probably something special, though, as he was normally a bit good for our meetings. Happy days.
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