Premier awards are by their very nature not easy to achieve, a Triple by any defintion must be one of the hardest awards in motorsport to win.
This year i think a dozen members could potentially win a triple if they could clean all the Edinburgh sections.
6 members did just that and indeed the only car Triple was won in class 1, an outstanding achievement in any year
so were the accused sections guilty as charged or are they falsly named and shamed ??
golds became silver for an interesting variety of reasons..
golds were lost on..middleton moor special test x1, clough wood x 1, cliff quarry x4, clough mine x3, dudwood special test x1, litton slack x5,
I note specifically that NO Triples or even Golds were lost on Dudwood sections..
The only Gold lost at the farm was on the special test....which caused me to look further and in fact FIVE medals of various types were lost on the special tests..
We base our section severity on a simple premise .. a third of sections will require concentration, a third will be testing and the final third will be a challenge. i think that was achieved in 2018.
Class O is a unique MCC class on the Edinburgh. unlike the other two trials class O does all bar two of the main trial sections.. with a couple of major concessions.. NO hill starts AND deviations from the main trial section route, for example on cliff quarry only 10% failed , 20% failed clough wood.. on the other hand, on dudwood 2 only 6 cars cleared the section, but that was a quarter of the class.
So in conclusion was Dudwood the grave yerd of Gold and Triple dreams? absolutely not. Was Cliff Quarry overly tough to stop the same hopefuls? 4 competitors lost golds here, on the other hand there were 45 motorcycles clean and 39 cars clean on the section.
That both sections cause delays is undisputed and will be addressed.