Cannons Motor Spares Tin Top Challenge honours went to Antony Harrison in both races on Saturday. Behind the south coast driver a superb battle raged featuring David Cox, Andrew Mitchell, Michael Cox, Garry Barlow, Gary Chappell, Luke Bennett and Terry Searles, who finished in that order but tried most of the alternative permutations in the course of 15 laps. Several of these were from the always hotly contested T3, which produced the 2009 champion Danny Cassar, a spectator this weekend. Gary Barlow’s last lap pass on Garry Chappell earnt him the drive of the race award, whilst Mr. Chappell got the best prepared car accolade.

Local man Berni Baxter impressed, winning T4 on his first outing with a newly acquired Fiesta but he lost out in race two when the front spoiler came adrift. A dodgy transponder meant the timekeepers were not recording Berni’s progress anyway.

No such problems for Harrison, who won again, but Mitchell out fumbled David Cox for second place on the last corner this time and 2008 champion Gary Chappell was fourth after slowing with gearbox bothers in the opening encounter. Gary did lower the class lap record. Kenny Coleman won the drive of the race prize by just holding off Steve Cassar.

Tony will be in action again at Mallory Park on the weekend of 16th May.

Having initially been turned down for a stand at the Classic Car Show this year, we are proud to announce that at this late stage the club has been granted a stand. With the trio of cars for the stand now selected the RCOC team are now hard at work preparing the stand.

This years theme is Motorways and we hope to build upon our experiences of the previous years to make out stand even better than last years.

The show this year will run from Friday 13th November to Sunday 15th November so come along and visit us. Tickets can be purchased in advance for a discounted price using the club discount code shown below. Don't forget to hand you ticket stubs over to us on the stand when you arrive so that the club can claim the commission.

The 2008 Classic Car Show will be held on the 14th-16th November at the NEC and once again The Rover Coupe Owners Club will be there on display.

As ever we will be asking people to put their cars forward for selection at the show in due course, however, in the mean time we need to decide what else will be on display on the stand. With this being our third year at the show we are going to make a big push to improve the overall quality of the stand, in terms of the fixtures & fittings around the car, with the aim of winning some prizes!

The theme for this years show is 'launches'. We are asking for members to put forward their ideas for how we can design our stand around this theme. Suggestions so far have included features on the Torsen Limited Slip Differential and Michelin Pilot tyres both of which were launched in conjuction with the coupe. If you have any bright ideas, please post them in the thread on the forum (CLICKY) or PM one of the moderators.

And for those of you who didn't make it to the show last year, this is what the stand looked like:

First of all, thank you all for your patience this weekend while I've done the upgrade. Following my dress rehersal last weekend I can report everything went relatively smoothly this weekend.

So whats changed?

Well I've implemented a new front end to the site with many new features already implemented and many more to come, the most noticeable one is the new events calendar. I would encourage members to use this when arranging events to avoid clashes with other events as has heppened in the past. You can still orgainise it on the forum but when you've arranged a time and place, please pass the details onto any of the moderators and we will add it to the calendar.

On the forum front we have upgraded to PHPBB3 which is a welcome change giving a far more powerful backend for the moderators/admins and a fresher look on the front end for the users. You will have no doubt noticed that the forum layout has changed slightly, during the testing of the site I tweaked this a few times and those that tested seemed to agree that the layout was better.