Palmers Farm in Wootton is a new venue for the IOWCC and the venue for the Jon Dyer Memorial Island Stages Rally. 

However, an adjacent field was the location for round 6 of the 2022 forward only autotest calendar.

This large and flat looking stubble field hid bumps and ruts but provided so much entertainment and tight competition for the 32 competitors that entered this event.

If you are 14 years old or above you can drive and compete in the IOWCC Youth Championship and it was amazing to see so many young people safely enjoying themselves behind the wheel.

Joel Gilby’s time in his MGZR slowly improved despite the track deteriorating as the day progressed. He and his fellow youth drivers are now challenging the old guard. Joel took the title of the fastest youth of the day and finished 16th place overall.

Motorsport is one of only a few sports were women and men compete in true equality, however, the club has a tradition of promoting and celebrating women in motorsport with the fastest lady of the day award. Today Cathy True took this title with a fantastic drive in her Mini Cooper S finishing 7th overall.

James Robbins in his Citroen C1 took the class 1 title finishing 10th place overall and Lewis Whittington claimed the class 2 award in his MX5 finishing 18th place overall.

Steven Staff in his Nissan Micra is consistently at the top of his class in 2022 and today was no different, taking class 3 and finishing 9th overall.

The dust at this event proved to be a challenge for drivers and marshals alike. Tyres were digging into the soft soil, kicking up clouds of fine powder and not so fine lumps of rock and gravel.

This resulted in cars struggling on the ever changing surface, often striking cones and incurring a 5 second penalty for doing so and marshals not being able to see the fallen cones due to the huge plumes of dust.

The more specialised cars had no such issues and so the podium was a battle of the rally cars versus Andy Williams in his single seater special.

Wayne Hole in his rally Ford Focus had one foot on the podium in the morning but the all wheel drive rally Subaru Imprezas of Dean Long and Jon Barrett had the edge. Dean finished 3rd place overall and Jon Barrett with its freshly logbooked Clubby claimed the class 4 win and stood on the second step of the podium.  Andy Williams did not have it all his own way today though, after an unheard wrong test on his first run, having to fix his mud guard with duct tape on his second run and worrying he might loose his lead in the closing runs, he claimed a well deserved event win standing on the top step of the podium.

Thank you so much to ProTek for being our podium sponsors supplying the awards, Jake Ellis for sponsoring our Youth Championship and the owners of Palmers Farm for an amazing venue.

Our next autotest event will be back at Atherfield on the 14th of August.

Please check out our website wwww.iowcc.co.uk for more details.