Qui Me Comitat Vincebit
TROFEO BALEARES CLĮSICO
March 8th - 11th
As soon as I saw details of the Trofeo de Baleares I was determined to participate as, having a home on the Island of Majorca, I knew how good the roads were and how beautiful the scenery. As it is not a large Island, I realized that the ability to stay in the same 4-star hotel every night was a big comfort plus.
As nobody in England seemed to have heard about this event I began to think maybe we would be the only U.K. entrant - which we were. However, the mainly German entrants were all very pleasant and mostly able to speak English. Although we know the hotel Galatzo (which is super) we decided to stay at our house about four miles away for a modest rebate! Spike Milligan was keen to initiate himself on this sort of rally, which was the usual competition/regularity format, so he shared the driving in our HWM-Jaguar.
Peter Raumann of Classic Concept had done a 5-year deal with the local Government to run the event, so being the first there was a learning curve. The general agreement of everyone I spoke to was that it was a good event, well organised and covering the most beautiful scenery. The competition section which we entered had 7 road sections on closed roads, a sea-front sprint and a circuit session in 3 days. Some of the road sections could have been a little longer but on a twisty circuit the 10 laps proved arduous.
We won our class and were the 2nd non-Porsche (!) in any class being beaten by a very fast Alfa 1300 GTS (1969). Other interesting cars were Alfa Monza (Klaus Werner), Lotus Mk9 with whom we had some good dices, Lotus Elite, Aston DB3S, OSCA MT (1953), Invicta S (1931), Maserati A6 GCS, Jaguar SS 100. These were all in the competition section (32 entries) with another 50 or so entries in the regularity.
All in all a very good fun, not too strenuous event which I would like to do again, hopefully with some UK entrants. Being the only car from U.K. our car transport cost us £1400. Peter Raumann is aware of all these problems and is going to try and address them. Fortunately the motoring calendar in early March is still not too crowded - there were two entries going on to Morocco!
R.W.
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