When Sir Stirling Moss and the eight mayors of the end-towns became involved, the hard-pressed volunteers found themselves severely overstretched. Several of the end-towns were organising fully-fledged welcome parties and exclusive stopover lunches, to which they now wished to know numbers and exact timing.
    We were particularly nervous of Bexhill’s super-enthusiastic events organiser, who telephoned on a regular basis, seemingly just to be sure that we still existed. Crystal Palace Park, too, was more than a little worrying. They were mostly of the attitude that “it would be alright on the night” or “as you are doing it for charity, yes we can do this and, yes, we can do that”, but at no time would they commit anything to paper, even their charges remained unclear almost to the last.
    The Veteran Car Club, on the other hand,  was pulling out every stop with their promised assistance during the actual run. Not only had they arranged as agreed for observers to authenticate each day’s run, but they were also persuading other members to swell the ranks of the daily end-town welcome parties.
    Fortunately, too, this steadily ageing mechanical enthusiast had by now become hooked on computer technology as an organising tool – all very different from fourteen years earlier when I was confronted with the ‘new young man’ and his ‘computer designed’ thirties-style bodies. In fact, without this new technology, I wonder how or whether a team as small as ours could have begun to cope with such an ever-growing event.