Reckon you've got a quick cartie? Taking part in more than one event in Scotland this year? Why not register for the SCA Championship and find out how good you really are! 

The SCA Championship is a competition run across the main soap box events in Scotland with the aim of encouraging participation in the various events and to creating friendly rivalry between teams.

Registered teams are awarded points for their final position in the participating events, and the team with the greatest number of points after the last event will be crowned as the SCA Champion. There are separate classes for Soapbox Cartie and Gravity Sidecar.

Please note that each race is independantly organised as a separate event. Teams registering for the SCA Championship should also register with each event that they wish to take part in. Registration for the SCA Championship does not include automatic entry into competing events, nor does it confer any special privileges. Since each event is an independant entity, the rules for each competition vary slightly. Please check with each event organiser to ensure your cartie or sidecar is eligible to compete.

Further information;

The new Gravity Sidecar class has been confirmed as eligible for Border Bogies and Cairngorm Soapbox Extreme, and looks likely for Catterline Carties too. Get those angle grinders out!

See our downloads page for the gravity sidecar tech' spec'.

The 2010 Border Bogie Challenge will run on Saturday May 22nd, and entries will be accepted from the 1st January 2010 onwards. More details will be published on the Border Bogie Challenge web site over the coming months, but last years details should give you a fair idea of what to expect. Keep looking for updates though.

Please contact the organisers for further details.

by Charles Armstrong-Wilson

Having seen the hill that the organizers of the Border Bogie intended to use for the event, I badly wanted to take part. But not having the time to build my own bogie, I called in a favour and rather cheekily turned up with MIRA’s Lindley Special. It was originally built for the Goodwood Festival of Speed’s gravity challenge where it competed successfully in 2001 and 2002. It was now sitting in a shed gathering dust at the company’s Warwickshire HQ and they were keen to see it used. Thankfully it was well received at Denholm and everyone, very sportingly, seemed happy to see it run.

The original cost of building the car caused some interest with the estimates overheard in the crowd ranging from £30,000 to £85,000. In fact, the total cost of parts was around £500. However, the cost of designing it would have been much higher if the trainees who built the car didn’t have the MIRA’s resources available for free.

Predictably the car was very competitive and after putting up the fastest time on the first run, I was keen to improve, particularly as I felt I had been a bit conservative, braking twice. Unfortunately, two corners from the finish on the second descent the car swapped ends, clobbered the bank on the left of the track and went backwards into the bales on the right. The looks on the faces of the girls sitting behind that particular straw bale were a picture.

Best Aggregate Time (Adults) : Slammer Mk III

Fastest Time of the Day : MIRA Lindley Special

Best Aggregate Time (Juniors) : Haggis Hunters

Best Engineered : Slammer Mk III

Team Tunbridge's 'MIRA Lindley Special' (pictured right) was easily the fastest cartie there, and a good 4 or 5 seconds quicker than its closest rivals, Slammer Mk III and Flying Ferret. However, it proved the old racing maxim "If you want to finish first, first you must finish", as its overall time was wrecked on the second run when it spun off into the bales just yards from the finish line.

Fortunately, for all the data geeks amongst us, there was a state of the art datalogger on board to record in minute detail the events leading up to its exit from the track, and driver Charles Armstrong-Wilson has written a really interesting piece to explain it in detail. It's got graphs and everything.