Treasure Hunt (7 July 2002)

The Newbury Mazda Treasure Hunt is an annual event which is not to be missed!

We turned up for about 10am, arriving in Newbury before realising we'd forgotten the directions to Newbury Mazda! Luckily, we recognised a turn, and taking it in a spirit of great optimism, were lucky enough to find ourselves at the appropriate venue!

After registering to get our clue sheet and getting a coffee, the Newbury staff showed us an amusing comparative review of the new Mazda 6 versus the Vauxhall Vectra, and then explained the rules. Then we headed off, about one car leaving every 30 seconds or so.

On leaving, we dropped the top, the odometer & trip mileages and time were recorded, and then we were on our own! (well, except for the line of MX5's bunched up at each traffic light :-)

The clues can be anything really. Mostly they are little diagrams of road intersections and roundabouts giving the direction to take, but in between these are questions to be answered (such as "dog and ----") which you have to keep your eyes peeled for (e.g. as you pass the Dog and Duck pub!). Sometimes the clues are a mile apart, and sometimes there are 4 or 5 to write down as you exit a roundabout, so (as I learned the hard way!) you have to avoid pelting off from an intersection and missing a load of clues! Nicole greatly enjoyed the telephone-box and post-box numbers, which involved her jumping out of the car and sprinting down the road to join a gaggle of confused MX5'ers squinting at the item in question to find the all important number!

The route probably never takes you more than 5 miles from Newbury Mazda, but we covered about 28 miles in all. This took us through some lovely villages (must go back for a proper look!) and then up into some farm-covered hills. We had a tricky job with the clue that asked how many dishes were on the tower - it was so misty when we finally found the communications tower in question, we couldn't actually see the top of it, lert alone count the dishes! Ah, well, we'd already missed several clues and didn't honestly expect to win, so we wrote down a guess and carried on.

Along the way, there were a variety of other objects we were meant to collect (a feather, a present for the organiser, a beer mat, and so on). We were a bit lazy, and skipped this part of it.

Despite several attempts to get lost, we arrived back at Newbury Mazda after about 90 minutes, and took our seats for the British Grand Prix, nipping out from time to time to grab some barbequeued sustenance!

All in all a fun and different day out - if you haven't done it before, be sure not to miss it next year - but make sure you bring a co-driver!!!

Jason Williams

It was great to see several of the WLA crew out at this event. As always, everyone had fun and even the Grand Prix was quite eventful. For those of you who left early, there were 3 'teams' who scored 101.5 out of 102 points! The winners also got 9 out of 10 in the tiebreak!!

Bob Pain