January 2025

An excellent year for the Club and our Austin Healey car driving. We started off with the Restoration show in March, I always enjoy considering the practical aspects of this show.

The well-established Daffodil Weekend in Norfolk has been running for a number of years and this coming year, the 33rd, is being run on the 4th - 7th April 2025.

Drive-It Day, held in April on the nearest Sunday to St George’s Day, is now well established with not just us organising road runs but many other car clubs raising money for the children’s charity, the NSPCC. This coming year it is on 27th April.

Our International Healey Meeting, organised by Southern Counties, was held in June 2024 at a hotel near Maidstone and was a great success with visits to the Historic Chatham Dockyard and Leeds Castle.

This year it will be run by Northern Centre, and I hope to see many of you at the Crewe Hall Hotel near Haslington on July 20th – 23rd. 2025.

The Club Concours was held in July at the Yorkshire Elegance event at Grantley Hall and does prove that we have some of the best prepared cars in this area.

An inter Marque club event was held in June at the Three Counties Showground in Malvern, which was well supported and indicates that events with a broader attraction of marques appeals to many members.

Those of you who attended the rather wet Autumn Classic weekend at Castle Combe experienced the delight of seeing Brian Wheeler's recreation of the SR Healey, a truly magnificent replica. Also on show was Peter Taylor's replica of the Le Mans Sprite, another fantastic recreation and one which we have displayed on the club stand at the NEC Classic car Show. In 2024, 130 of you bought our discounted tickets to the NEC show and were able to admire the Austin Healey stand, organised extremely ably by Rob Hudson and his team.

Just a reminder now for you to look on the website to locate your model register. The registers have been running for some considerable number of years back to the 1960s and help us keep a constant update on the number of Austin Healey models that still exist. This also allows us to verify these cars as they change ownership. The registers have recently been updated with a lot of work put in by our registrars. To comply with GDPR, we do not disclose members’ personal details.

As you will have seen from the pages of our in-house magazine Revcounter, we have gone from strength to strength on the publishing of technical articles, firstly from the pages of the Norman Nock book and now, more recently, from our own members. These latter have also been included on various Centre websites, so you don't have to look far for advice. Our thanks to Steve Everest and Ian Foster for rooting these out.

Our membership cards have now recently gone digital so all you need to do is log on to the membership page and follow the prompts. As you can imagine, the cost of printed individual cards had proved substantial. so now seems the right time to join the digital revolution!

Our Healeysport programme continues to be well supported and very successful. The last Sprint at Goodwood provided yet more personal best times to round off the 2024 series. The overall championship winner was Ian Thomas. Well done!

This year was of course the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day landings and several members took the opportunity to take the ferry across the Channel and visit the museums, which surround Pegasus Bridge and the Omaha and Gold beaches.

Looking ahead to 2027, the “7th European Healey Meeting” will be organised by the Austin Healey Club of the Nederlands and all information on actual dates and the venue will be published on Facebook, so please keep an eye out for the website title as above. 2027 will also be the 75th anniversary of the Austin Healey marque.

Our thanks, as always, to the officers of the Club and to those on the Centre committees for their hard work and enthusiasm in running and keeping our Club in the fine position in which it finds itself.

All the best for a great New Year driving our fantastic Healeys.