The 5th running of the Mike Leonard Memorial Endurance Race took place on Saturday 30th December 2000.

On a very cold and snowy morning the Warehouse was opened early to warm up and re-lay the tracks. Official opening was 10.00am and I am happy to say that most people were on time. On-road numbers were good but off-road was sparse. Although some drivers did come for off-road there were not enough to make a separate competition. It was decided to have mixed teams with at least one off-roader in each.

As is always the case with this type of racing, crystals are the biggest nightmare. Thankfully most drivers  had put their names forward early and I had been able to sort them into reasonable teams. Unfortunately there were some late comers and also some drivers had either changed crystals or "left them at home". This meant some quick! resorting and left at least 2 teams a bit short on experienced drivers. This showed up later and in future I will have to insist on pre-booking for this type of event.

Anyway, all was sorted by just after 11.00am, then the AMB caused problems so it was at 11.30am that the first session started. One rule that we have used successfully at previous runnings of this event is Team marshalling where cars are only marshalled by members of their own team. This takes some getting used to and causes great problems at times. I have never seen some of the members move as quickly as when trying to reach a crashed car on the other side of the track. The sight of Colin Blades and Martin Oliver in full flight was worth the entry fee alone.

The off-road track turned out to be much longer than the on-road, about 5 seconds a lap. So it was shortened after about 1/2hr and after that the lap times were almost identical.

This session team 1 had got things sorted and were off to a good early lead with team 5 hot in pursuit. Team 3 were again "up their tricks" as one person said but I ruled that it was all in the spirit of the event. The lead ebbed and flowed as drivers changed and it soon became clear that team 4 would not win, falling many laps down. It became a chase between teams 5, 1 and 3. With team 5 taking a 9 lap lead over  team 3 and 11 laps over team 1 into the final session it would take a lot for them to be overtaken.

Team 1 stayed in the lead but for about 60 minutes team 5 kept the gap down to about 2 or 3 laps then things started to happen to team 5. Malcolm Hebden and Jordan Taylor's off-road cars broke down and they had to switch to their unused saloon cars. peter Craig was doing one of his usual stints and pulling back laps when his wheel came off and there was no-one ready to take his place. They lost about 4 laps on that one incident and when Malcolm and Jordan went for their stints it was obvious that their cars were not sorted.

The gap between teams 1 and 5 became 13 laps, putting team 1 into the lead. Little Greg Williams was doing a good job but gave way to Louise Hebden off-road. With 12 minutes to go Peter went on to try and make up those vital 2 laps against Doug Pratt off-road. Peter thought he might get through to the end but his 3000's were not fully charged and he had to change over to Richard Haines with 4 minutes to go, but by then team 1's lead had been reduced to 9 laps and with the change over it was going to be very tight. Doug managed to keep going to the end and avoided another change over which would have been decisive.