1st November 2010

This is the Blog site for the Vines / Moss rally team partnership with a 1964 Austin Mini Cooper S entered into the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique 2011. http://www.acm.mc/rmch/rmch_main.php

Here you can find news of preparations before, and our progress during the rally.

To introduce ourselves - My name is Alastair Vines, I am 52 years old, have a wife and one seven year old daughter. I was raised in Kent, spent some time working on gas rigs in the North Sea before settling into the car manufacturing industry in the Midlands. I have participated in the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique with a successful Mini rally team for the last ten years.
Peter Moss is my navigator who is a business man in Surrey and of unspeakable age. He has participated in this rally on six previous occasions, and has plenty of experience to get us round and enable us to do very well.

We are supporting the charity "Bliss" http://www.bliss.org.uk/%20by by passing 30% of all sponsorship moneys attracted to the charity, and the balance of 70% being utilised to enable the team to participate by funding the entry fees and team running costs. Our target is to raise £10,000 of which £3,000 will go to Bliss. Beyond this amount all additional monies raised will go directly to the charity. The rally team will make no money from this initiative beyond what it needs to participate in the event.


Bliss is the special care baby charity which provides vital support and care to premature and sick babies across the UK.

Bliss provides practical and emotional support for families during an extremely difficult time, so that they can give the best care to their babies. Specialist study days and training support doctors and nurses to develop their skills, and research is funded in order to improve the care of all sick and premature babies. Bliss raises awareness of the issues affecting special care babies and fights for essential change within government and the NHS.

Contact details for Bliss are:

• Bliss, 9 Holyrood Street, London Bridge, London, SE1 2EL
• Tel: 020 7378 5745
• http://www.bliss.org.uk/

My daughter was born at 27 weeks, was very unwell and in hospital for over four months. She is now nearly seven years old and has made an extraordinary recovery, and today you would not know that she had been so ill. Raising money through my entry to the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique is my way of trying to return some of the help, support and goodwill my family received from all sorts of agencies during her earliest years.
Please support my ambition to do this.

The Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique for classic cars is in its fourteenth year, although the up-coming rally in 2011 is co-incidentally the 100th year of the Monte-Carlo rally, so it is expected to be quite a special event. It is a regularity event organised by the Auto Club de Monaco with a format that replicates the Monte-Carlo rallies from the golden age of rallying in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This year there are starting points from Glasgow, Warsaw, Marrakesh, Reims and Barcelona, and will attract about 350 cars and crews from all over the world. The event commences on Wednesday 26th January and will finish on Wednesday 2nd February 2011.

The concept is that cars start from different points around Europe and drive day and night (Concentration run) toward a common meeting point, before heading South (Common run) to Monaco for the first night halt on Saturday 29th January. For the next four days the cars battle it out amongst the snow and ice in the mountain passes of France to find an eventual winner. History judges that to finish the event at all is a huge achievement for most crews.

We are competing in this fantastic rally in a 1293cc Austin Mini Cooper S - CRX 89B which has an extensive competition history going all the way back to the 1960s.

It was built in September 1964 at the Austin car assembly plant in Longbridge, Birmingham, England and dispatched to the MG Works at Cowley near Oxford for conversion into an International rally car for the BMC Competitions Dept. It's first event was the 1964 RAC rally with Rauno Aaltonen where it subsequently retired with transmission failure. In the hands of Paddy Hopkirk, Rauno Aaltonen and Tony Fall, CRX did spectacularly well during the 1965 season helping Rauno to become European Rally Champion in that year, with wins for him on the Polish and 3 Cities rallies. Paddy was also in luck with wins on the Circuit of Ireland and the International slalom autotest event in Luxembourg. Following the RAC, in which Tony Fall brought it home in 15th place, it was used as a recce car for the 1966 BMC Team on the infamous Monte-Carlo rally, where the entire BMC team were disqualified for a lighting infringement after finishing 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

The car was sold into private ownership after the 1966 Monte and subsequently entered into the 1966 and 68 RAC rallies. It was engaged into a long and arduous rally career enjoying quite a bit of success whilst enduring several big offs resulting in extensive rebuilds. I bought it in 1986 and prepared it for the very earliest Pirelli Classic Marathon rallies of 1988 & 89 running from London to northern Italy and back. More recently we re-drove the exact route of the 1965 Circuit of Ireland in 2005 to rally time in celebration of 40 years since Paddy Hopkirk's win on that event.

Now that we are introduced I will show you a film of the very snowy 2010 Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique in my next post.