You can pick your weekend, but you can't pick the weather! Regular visitors to the site will have noticed that the date for the 1100 Club National rally had been brought forward to avoid it clashing with the BL day which is held at Peterborough.

This date switch meant altering a few dates here and there, but hopefully we'd be guaranteed a good turn out from the 1100 community?

The Saturday morning my father, myself and Declan Berridge loaded up Dino (My Mk1 Austin miniMetro) and started making our way towards Rufford. On the way over we seemed to keep hitting the odd rainy patch, but by the time we arrived at Rufford the sun was shinning.

This year Peter Barrowclough was to be organising the event. It was his first year, and he'd gone for a different approach to the "traditional" National Rally feel. Which I felt made the event much more interesting and broke the mould.

The AGM followed in the afternoon, as usual members got to hear how the club was doing and if anyone had any points they wished to raise they were able to do this while committee members were there to handle their queries. The evening entertainment also had a face lift this year and instead of a barn dance a 60's - 70's band was invited to play.

Sunday morning soon arrived and the cars were being lined up. This year we managed to take four cars between us. Declan took his Mk1 Vanden Plas 1100, my father took our Mk3 Austin 1300 Countryman, my mother took my Mk2 Morris 1300, and I took our 1300GT. All cars had to be in place by 11am for judging, and there were only 42 cars for judging.

I was quite disappointed by the turn out, classic car clubs are currently struggling to keep members. Cars are getting older, a cross section of the membership is getting older and therefore are not able to attend events.

It was nice to catch up with usual suspects, Chris Jones, Dave Wilkins, Hywell Dinsdale, the list is endless.

We were lucky to have two special guests attend this years National, Stephen & Jennifer Lawrence, from Australia. Stephen & Jennifer are regular contributors to The 1100 Club magazine, Idle Chatter, and kindly donated a trophy that was in memory to Jennifer's mother who had purchased a Morris 1100 and driven it around in the UK, when they left they took the car back to Australia. Some years later Jennifer & Stephen decided to restore the car to it's former glory.

Stephen & Jennifer stated that the trophy would be awarded to the Best 1300GT and they way the category should be judged is by looking for the most original example. The vehicle is allowed to have dents on it and the odd scratch here and there. We were very honoured to win this new award.