Bath Motor Club History
What started out as an attempt to compile some history on the club for the 60th Anniversary, in 2023, has resulted in a major project to archive the history of Bath Motor Club.
For the 60th Anniversary a document was created to list out the “external” events the club has organised. This includes the main events the club has organised, like the Festival Rally, the Azimghur Stages, and the AutoSolos more recently.
This list has grown since then, as copies of magazines from older members have been dropped on our door step, members have found boxes of event documentation in their garage or their attic. This has resulted in a large scanning exercise, mainly on wet days, or this summer when it’s been too hot to be outdoors.
The catalyst for this project was finding some details on the Chieftain Rally, a multi venue stage rally run on Salisbury Plain, between 1972 to 1986, expect for 1981, when a single venue event, The Lodge Stages, was run instead. Entry lists, photos, results and reports have been found for nearly all the events. This was the first Stage Rally the club organised and more have followed throughout the 60 odd years.
Next up was the Festival Rally. This has run in various forms, from a Road Rally, a Stage Rally and more recently a Targa Rally. The first was in 1964, and it ran as a Road Rally until 1972. From 1975 to 1980 it was a Stage Rally, running in Wiltshire and Dorset. In 1981 it reverted back to a Road Rally, and it peaked as a round of the Motoring News Road Rally Championship between 1984 through to 1987. It was resurrected as a Road Rally in 2012, before changing to a Targa Rally in 2018. The 2027 edition of the Festival Targa Rally will be its 38th edition.
The next big event which had dominated the Bath MC and ASWMC calendar was the Azimghur Stages. A Stage Rally run continuously at Colerne Airfield from 1984 to 2009. The event had a reputation of being hard on cars, due to its high speed, but that didn’t put people off as the entry was full most years.
Other Rallies which have come and gone, are events like the Aquae Sulis Rally, the Great Western Rally, the Asham Stages Rally, the Jubilee Rally, the Henry Liddon Memorial Rally (Henry Liddon was a Bath MC member), the Targa in the Dark Rally, and more recently the Castle Combe Stage Rally.
It is worth mentioning the club was also responsible for the help desks for crews, marshals, and spectators for all of the RAC Rallies that started in Bath in 1976, 1980, 1983 and 1986.
Rallying hasn’t been the main events of Bath Motor Club. As early as 1973 the club had been organising AutoCross events and this was a regular event through until 1994, with the club hosting the RAC AutoCross final on at least one occasion.
The club had been a regular host of the ASWMC Autotest Championship, as early as 1974, up until 2011, where the tend for AutoSolos took over from Autotests. The club hosted many RAC Autotest Finals at the Westbury Cement Works which brought the best competitors from all over the country.
The club has been a part of the ASWMC AutoSolo Championship since 2013, with its first events held in 2011, original at Castle Combe and more recently at Kemble Airfield, however the club is returning to Castle Combe in December of this year.
Bath MC has also run many successful Touring Assemblies/Classic Tours, with the Aquae Sulis Tour, which first ran in 1998, and one year finishing at an open air concert at Longleat Estate. More recently the event has run continuously from 2013, with only COVID preventing it running in 2020.
The task of archiving the clubs events is a length task but has been rewarding as it has highlighted the amount of “external” events the club has organised, which is totalling in excess of 250, since its formation in 1963. We have some barren years for the history, namely from the late sixties, and we are sure there are some events we have missed completely.
If you have any information you would like to share with the club, then please feel free to contact us, either by e-mail or via the Facebook page. You never know you might have a set of results for one of the events we are missing, ie 2000 Azmighur Stages for example.
Martin Moore
See how we support local charities with our club donations and optional donations from events in the year.
