‘Monkey’ is my trials car, a 1995 Suzuki X-90 2 wheel-drive (they did a 4x4 option) . Jeremy Clarkson famously declared the X-90 to be one of the “worst cars of the decade” when it was new! Luckily thats now given it a degree of cult following. No Englishman can resist an underdog. It's part of the national psyche (see our cricket team).
Monkey has been unwell. In fact we missed competeing in any events during the 2024 and 2025 seasons while a severe attack of “tin worm” was dealt with . Now the X-90 is quite a rugged little device, hence it's popularity in car trials . It has an old fashioned separate chassis and a live rear axle, McPherson struts at the front and a single cam 16v 1600cc engine that is , with the best will in the world, no ball of fire. It doesn't have a lot of torque at low revs….and it doesn't rev very high…you get the picture I am sure. And the metal they used in the bodyshell is very thin and so when it rusts - which it certainly does, it's over 30 and it's allowed to - there isn't much matrial to fall back on. In the case of Monkey the floor rusted round the 6 chassis mounts and required a lot of welding to make good. The problem was that I could not afford to pay someone to fix it and I had never learned to weld. Well, I guess I have now!
At times it felt like the dictionary definition of ‘the weekend’ was ‘welding Monkey’ . I seemed to do little else for several months. It was always in an awkward spot to reach, often positioned so the sun , when it shone, was in my eyes as I worked , and ocassionally a hot spark would burn holes in my jeans or my shirt or the back of my hand! But eventually I got there and the prized MOT Pass was granted. Even if actually getting out of where Monkey had been parked up during the restoration, to get to the MOT station was no small matter! The notorious Forest of Dean wild boar had dug up the nice flat grass verge outside and turned it into a very slippery imitation of a ploughed field!
That was all happening just before Christmas 2025 and the new MOT allowed me to enter a few events at the start of this year before the trials season started it's long break at Easter.
In days gone by (2019-2023) my eldest daughter Charlotte acted as passenger and navigator , but she's now away at University and her younger sister Georgie is not minded to take over. Instead my long time freind and former rally navigator Ian Beale took over the role in recent times and we had a few really good runs at the end of 2024 before mechanical woes led to this long restoration situation.
Last season we did borrow Nick Deacon's highly competitive X-90 to take part in the Rosenreg Trial near Stroud. And we won the class. That was so much fun it spurred me on to get Monkey finished
Nick Deacon's Championship Winner in my care on the 2025 ROSENREG TRIAL
And so at 10am on a late January morning in 2025 we sat in the car park of THE SQUIRRELL pub at Ludlow, Shropshire, awaiting the start of the CLEE HILLS TRIAL and I must say it was good to be back.
Despite appearances it WAS good to be back…honest!
The event however was a bit of a disappointment. The weather had been so wet and miserable over the winter that several of the best 'observed secions' which the points are won and lost, had become rendered impassable by fallen trees and flooding, so were dropped from the route.
Monkey waiting in line on the Clee Hills
Three more ‘sections’ were abandoned during the day for the same reason, leaving us back at the THE SQUIRRELL having finished by 3pm, the route down to a mere 7 sections when it would in the past have been over double that number. It felt as if we had hardly got going. The first time Charlotte and I tackled the Clee Hills we started about 8am and were fully in the dark before the last couple of sections were attempted, Sadly the 2026 running was something of a shadow of it's former self. Not that we didn't enjoy it…it just felt like eating the starter rather than the main course. We did finish 2nd in class but quite a long way down on winner Nigel Williams and with only a few other starters. It seems like all X-90s are suffering the same rust issues at this point in time and the entries have suffered.
Monkey waiting in line on the COTSWOLD CLOUDS
A couple of weeks later we were back in our native Gloucestershire for the COTSWOLD CLOUDS TRIAL which includes climbing the famous Nailsworth Ladder (a 1 in 3 gradiant on loose gravel) and probably NOT climbing what most people consider the most difficult hill in the country, Crooked Mustard. This year the usual circuitous route had been reversed and Mustard, which normally happens early on, became one of the last elements to tackle and that meant some of us would be going up in the dark.
We must be thinking of Tackling CROOKED MUSTARD in the dark…a serious business!
Apart from a bit of a misfire while cruising between sections on half throttle, Monkey went well and although we finished 2nd again - this time to Richard Kinver - it felt like a much better effort and a much more challenging event overall. We did finish in the dark but we managed to reach the fiersome Crooked Mustard with some daylight left, albeit in a shower of rain …not that we got to the top…
Monkey looking depressed at failing CROOKED MUSTARD
That left the MARCH HARE TRIAL , starting from the former RAF Honeybourne near Evesham and this is where the pressure came in. Charlotte and I won the class when we took part in 2023. I passengered for Nick Deacon in 2025 and we also won the class, and were 2nd overall in a field of about 80…without dropping a single point all day. Now I was back, with Ian reading the maps and had my eye in again , so to speak, so would I maintain that winning streak?
It didn't start to well, a big hidden rock left quite a dent in the sill just ahread of the rear wheel on section 2…
Battle Damage…
But we did better than the MGF that was running behind us. It hit the same rock , blew a rear tyre and put a dent in the rim the size of a coffee mug! Then I made a mess of one restart and lost points because I had not read the regulations properly and made ‘assumptions’… I won't do that again!
Generally this is one of those events where a lot of the many sections are fairly easily ‘cleaned’ without gaining any penalty points for getting stuck , but right in the middle of the route is a knot of very short and rather savage sections in the lunar landscape of Fry's Quarry on top of Cleeve Hill. This is where the event is normally won or lost . Our entire class all managed to get stuck at the same place on the first of these as the initial corner was marked out tighter than the steering lock on any of our cars permitted us to turn!
Monkey waits in line (this is a theme…) at Fry's Quarry behind an Austin 7
Fry's has a notorious blind brow on one section, beyond which the road goes sharp right at just the point where all you can see is the sky! The organisers do warn us….they are not that mean, but there is a barbed wire fence on the outside to snare anyone not turning soon enough!
What Lies Beyond…?
But we ‘cleaned’ this one and avoided the fence, cleaned the other sections at Fry's too and went through to the finish without losing any more points! The result was a class win and maintining that unbeaten streak . Very satisfying.
The March Hare does have a slightly epic nature to it; it's long, complicated, has some odd little features and, in our case, it finished in the dark too. We reached the a pub on the edge of Minchinhampton Common where the organisers even supplied a complimentary drink as we signed off!
It was a soft one in my case as I was driving home afterwards, but it was a convivial end to a tough and very enjoyable event. Three March Hares entered and three class wins! We were chuffed with that. It made all the efforts to weld Monkey back to health seem worth every spark burn…
Now there's a wait untill it all kicks off again in late September.
2CV ‘Tin Snails’ on the March Hare
Beetles of the Clee Hills
Suzuki X-90s on the Clee Hills
Richard Evans' MG Special on the Clouds
Ray and Hannah Fergusson's LIEGE shows how muddy the Clouds trial was…
Austin 7 and Riley on the Clee Hills
