quick start
bfpcr
rules
safety
teams
international
world records

home > info > world records > pc1000 > report

PC1000

World 1000-mile Pedal Car record attempt
at Curborough Sprint Circuit

Report

Information

Report

Pictures

Easter Weekend 2002
Good Friday, March 29^th to Easter Monday, April 1^st

The PC1000 race plan
pc1000laptimes.zip (zipped Excel spreadsheet of all 2,683 lap times and speeds - 286kB)

Ow.

In global business terms, 1,000 miles isn't very far. Travel 1,000 miles from Heathrow, for example, and you're not even vaguely close to your New York office. 3 days in the course of a normal life is only about half a working week, with maybe 8 hours per day at school or work, the other 16 split between eating, sleeping, watching TV, etc.

In a pedal car, 1,000 miles is an awfully long way. 3 days in a Staffordshire field, with your time split between pedalling, eating, pedalling, eating, worrying how good your next stint will be, pedalling, eating and sometimes sleeping; now those 3 days are a very, very long time.

In the ten months of organisation that PC1000 involved, from initial concept to first lap, the terms "1,000 miles" and "72 hours" rolled almost glibly off the tongue with no pain involved. This, I now know, is because it's very, very difficult to get a handle on just how big 1,000 miles is in human terms, and just how long 72 hours really is when you have to live each and every one of those hours rather than simply letting them happen around you.

Possibly also it's because that in the subconscious recesses of your brain, part of you genuinely does know how far and how long the numbers represent; it also knows that if it lets the conscious part of you work this out in advance, you'll think up an excuse not to do it, you'll think it up good and you'll think it up fast. In effect, the brain is protecting you from the fear of pain. It's scared, and it's too scared to let on that it's scared.

The first warning sign is terminology. "72 hours" I could usually cope with - after all, an hour is not very long, so 72 hours is just a stack of not very long periods. Then someone would include the phrase "...when we're into our third day..." somewhere. Think about that. A full 24 hour race takes one complete day. Think how tired you are at the end of a 24 hour race. Take that, then add another 24 hour race onto it, immediately after and without a break. Done that? Good. If you're going as well as GCR, you're still more than two hundred miles short of your target. That's further than London to Swansea; more than the length of the entire M4.

Then your technical director assures you that he is entirely confident the beautiful new car built specifically for the event will last for 500 miles. Half way. Beyond that, the team has absolutely no data on reliability and performance as the race cars are stripped and rebuilt after each race. Come to that, even 500 miles is further than any GCRE-maintained car has run without attention. So you'll be racing against the clock for nearly a day and a half with no guarantee of any kind that you'll get beyond half way to your goal, for all your efforts, even in a car from GCRE, who build some of the most reliable cars in the sport.

Still thinking you'd like a crack at it?

If so, try this: Come and race the Swansea 24-hour race. See how you feel at the end of it, and imagine doing it all again, immediately. When you've done that, you have to pedal out of Margam Park and all the way to London. And you still wont be finished when you get there.

Maybe, just maybe, you're starting to understand why this was the hardest thing I've ever done, in both physical and mental terms, in or out of a pedal car. I can't speak for the rest of the team, but I suspect you'll get the same answer if you ask them.

The start

Approaching noon on Good Friday, the small team stands around the brand new D-type pedal car on the Curborough start line. Chris is ready in the car and sets off for a couple of warm-up laps while the rest of the team crack gentle gags in the warm sunshine ("So, does he really believe this PC1000 thing then?"). Chris is now back and ready to go. Everything is in place, the video is running, the weather is unquestionably the best that any pedal car event has had at Curborough and we're all happy as the clock ticks down to noon. Confidence, as Hollywood would have you believe they say at NASA, is high.

"Three ... Two ... One ... GO!"

Chris departs with a minimum of fuss; no point stressing the drive system with a sprint start for a 1,000 mile event, after all. 81 seconds later he is back and travelling nicely quick, still building speed and feeling his way in. The last time he took Flagpole at a good speed was five weeks previously, and even then he'd only had a couple of dozen attempts at it, as had the other drivers in our half-hour test sessions. Still, he holds it all together.

Another 69 seconds pass and he's back again, really travelling this time, flying through the hairpin bend and using absolutely all the tarmac. In pedal car races, this is a reasonably open turn, but this car is somewhat quicker than any that have gone before it, meaning the corner is that little bit trickier. Chris' lap times settle to the low to mid 70's, meaning he clocks 50 laps in the first hour. Fifty! No team has ever completed more than 48 in an hour of racing here; no individual has ever done more than 47. Not a bad first stint then. Bill gets in next and for the first half of the next hour doesn't do a lap slower than 70 seconds. Even when his pace eases, it's only by a little and by the end of his hour, he's done only 3 laps slower than 72 seconds. 51 laps in an hour. Wow.

The rest of us can't match this phenomenal speed, but things are still progressing well and we're way up on the 66-hour schedule, that Chris has evidently spent some time calculating, as evening arrives.

First night

As dusk approaches we realise that the price for the crystal clear, cloudless, sunny day is going to be a cold night, but none of us realise just how cold it's going to get. As darkness cloaks the track during hour 8, Bill finds a major problem with the circuit lighting - you can't see the track! The lights as arranged do a good job of dazzling the driver in the turns without letting him see where the boundaries are, which is obviously a particularly poor state of affairs that is costing Bill a whopping ten seconds per lap by 8pm.

I'm next in the car and it doesn't take long to find out Bill wasn't kidding. Fortunately, he and Chris do an excellent job of rearranging the lighting and, once you've got your "night vision" tuned in, it's now not too hard to follow the track. The corners are now lit sufficiently to make out and for the rest you can look out the side of the car and follow the white lines that border the track, just visible in the darkness. A broken line means you're on a straight; when it becomes solid you're approaching a corner. At the end of the Shenstone Straight, when the tent looms out of the darkness and you cross the finish line, it's time to sit up, shift your weight and start the turn; in Molehill it's a case of "turn right, count to four, turn left". With all the other visual clues you normally rely on in racing - like, being able to see where you're going - removed, it's quite fun. By the end of my hour at 9pm I've got it all pretty much sorted and my lines are not very far off daylight ones, despite rarely actually looking forwards from the cockpit. Unfortunately, the on-board communication radio has let go, which isn't good. We swap radios after 10pm to no avail, so rather than wasting more time on it, we write off comms for the rest of the event. Shame, it's very comforting to have the ability to talk to the pits, and to have them tell you how you're doing; without them it's very lonely out there in the dark.

By now it's also cold. Really, horribly cold. So cold that we're burning a lot of energy just staying warm enough to stay awake and alive, leaving far less for pedalling. By 11pm, Bill is losing 10 seconds a lap compared to his afternoon times and it's not getting warmer. Midnight sees me the wrong side of 15 seconds per lap down and Chris is similarly affected; our laps per hour count is behind target for 66 hours. It's just so damn cold! When I hand over to Chris at midnight, I crawl into the unheated changeover tent, pull on two coats and slump into a folding chair which nearly does its thing underneath me. I don't care, I'm shivering too much to really notice, but I'm falling asleep in the freezing temperature and getting seriously worried about not waking up ever again if I do. And I still have another stint to do before bedtime.

Eventually I pull it together, mentally shouting at myself to get up, change shoes and get back to the pits where it's a fraction warmer. I'm able to get some warm food as well, which helps. My back is soaking though, wet through with sweat that is now very, very cold indeed against my skin. Not pleasant. Fortunately Chris has been stretching his car time, with the result that my stint to finish the eight-hour shift is only 25 minutes long in the run-up to 2am. Still, when it happens I've never been so happy to see Mark before in my life, and I'm delighted to be able to hand the car over to him and watch him drive off into the darkness, knowing that I'm heading for bed. By 3am I've eaten hot food, hydrated a little, and we're in the nice warm Travelodge up the road where we might be able to grab 6 hours in bed if we're lucky. Bliss. However, there's a nagging thought going around my brain: We've only been going 14 hours, a little over half a '24, and we're already behind our pre-event schedule and I'm feeling terrible. What's it going to be like two days from now?

Through the rest of the night, from 2 until 10am, the other 3-man shift of Mark, Jeremy and John had found pretty much the same as Chris, Bill and I - it was damn cold, which robbed speed and the warmer the top you wore in the car, the more your back sweated and the colder it thus became as soon as you got out.

Day two

When Chris gets back in at 10am, we're nearly 40 laps behind the 66-hour schedule - most of an hour. However, it is now warming up again and Chris and Bill play blinders. Combined with a recovery on my part as well, we clock 48, 45, 46 and 46 laps over the course of the four hour shift, which we'd split into 40-minute driving stints. The fight-back has started, and it appears that Chris' pre-event estimates of our tire rates had been pessimistic as we pull 16 laps of the deficit back by 2pm.

2pm! Great! That means we're into the second day! That means we're... Oh, no it doesn't. We're not half way yet. Not anywhere even vaguely close. More food and a few hours asleep in a tent takes me to 6pm as the other shift does their 4 hours - or at least it should have done. When I wake up it's actually 7pm, Chris is getting out of the car and Bill getting in. Initially I'm a bit miffed that my shift has started without me being awake to see it, but it's not hard to work out that if you can have an extra hour in bed, you'd be well advised to take it and be damn well grateful. Checking back, a comment in the lap charts at about ten to six notes the passing of the Queen Mother. We didn't stop for two minutes. Sorry.

Adrian drops by to see how we're doing and tells us that thanks to the cloud cover it wont get as cold as Friday night, when, apparently, it hit minus two. Minus two? That would explain why it felt so cold then...

Into the darkness... again

Chris and Bill are still banging out sub-80-second laps, each of them clocking around 47 laps per hour. More than 24 hours into this event, they're still equalling the best ever previous solo hour performances in a pedal car. Impressive. It's all I can do to keep my times below 85 seconds, which is a more-or-less respectable 42 laps per hour. We've also just passed half distance, which is a cause for a brief moment of joy, until the realisation hits you that "half way" means you have to do everything you've just done all over again. More importantly, we're rapidly closing in on our 66-hour schedule again and still not tiring as expected; Friday night's extreme cold being the main reason we're behind.

At some point around here, Coronation Street is on the TV. We actually brought the TV to monitor the video recording, but it's been fine up to now so someone's tuned in a couple of channels. One of the female characters is complaining about having "just done the longest night-shift in history". Cue howls of derision from all of us in the control booth.

Then I hit the wall, big style. Luckily it's at the end of a stint, so I'm only losing 20 seconds per lap for a couple of laps, but it's painfully slow. Chris takes over as I collapse into the changeover tent for a second time in as many nights; this time I can't even contemplate standing up, so I lay there in the darkness, face down, feet sticking out the door and onto the tarmac in what might have been a comedy style, if there'd been light enough for anyone to see it. Eventually I drag myself upright and stagger back to the pits for some food. Yum, more pasta...

Chris and Bill continue to power on, Bill knocking out mid-70s, lap after lap, until it's my turn again. On his final lap, the drive wheel flats as he passes the changeover tent. Don't ask me how, but with a flat drive wheel tyre he bangs in a 69-second in-lap - approaching 20mph, for over half a kilometre, with a flat drive. Unreal. This is the first incident approaching problem status, and only the second tyre change, of the event so far. Later examination revealed it wasn't actually a puncture - a couple of spokes had broken, and as the wheel deformed slightly, one broken spoke had wedged itself into the air valve, releasing the pressure almost instantaneously. So not only had Bill put in a stunning lap with a flat drive tyre, the drive wheel itself hadn't been quite round either.

Getting in again, I can't clip in properly, but I pedal away anyway, confident of engaging the Look's properly once under way. Mistake. It's virtually impossible to see into the front of the car in daylight with the canopy in place; it's certainly out of the question at night. Can I get either shoe to clip into the pedals? No. So I can't get any power down either. In the inky blackness, unseen from the control hut, I coast to a halt between Woodside and the Molehill, anchor up and then, carefully, feel around in the darkness to engage first one pedal, then the second. Only then can I set off with any conviction. Very annoying.

As the night progresses, several degrees warmer than Friday's, we edge closer, and then past, our 66 hour schedule waypoints, despite my hitting the wall again (but not as badly this time) and Chris, in the darkness, taking an excursion into the greenery between the Molehill and Fradley Hairpin, when he loses concentration for a couple of seconds. When he tells us about it, we give him a good bit of stick, but it's very easy to understand why. Apart from the obvious, that we've been racing for nearly 36 hours now, and the also-obvious that it's bloody dark out there, there are two other mitigating factors. One, due to the lighting, exiting the Molehill is the only time in the lap when you can catch sight of the on-board computer clock (if you're lucky), which thus allows you to time your own laps. Second, as you're doing this, the first light on the Fradley Hairpin is not at the entry but actually part-way into the turn. So, you have to aim into the darkness, not at the first light. If you're not very careful when you're checking the time it's easy subconsciously to aim in the wrong direction and head for the grass.

Around midnight, Chris has finally slowed - but only fractionally, to around 84 seconds per lap, while Bill is still knocking out the 75s, regular as clockwork. Again my last stint to 2am is a relatively short one, but I'm feeling good in the low 80s - probably the only time in the entire event I'm quicker than Chris - so this time I'm happy to stretch it out, beyond the official end of the shift, and hand over to Mark at ten past the hour. Almost immediately, the air feels damp like it's thinking about raining.

In the control booth, Simon comments that we're now into the 38th hour. He sounds so jovial about it that if his voice had been a semitone different in either direction, I'd have been forced to stab him to death with the car key I happened to be holding at the time. The worst thing would have been, it wouldn't have been anything personal...

After a hot meal, my trip to the Travelodge is delayed a little while we wait for Jeremy to come back with the key to the second room. As a result, and combined with a strange and perverse inability to sleep, I actually get under 5 hours sleep, less than the previous night.

Zzz...

The beauty of being third man in my shift is that, although I get to bed last, I can stay in bed later in the morning. At 9am, the alarm goes off and I slowly come round before stumbling to the door to collect our free breakfasts (many thanks to Travelodge, Burton-on-Trent, for these!). Some people are passing our window on a narrow boat. No really, they are; the Trent & Mersey canal passes within about 20 feet of the Travelodge. Lucky gits. Breakfast and a hot shower later, we collect up our stuff and make sure no-one's left anything in the room, before heading out and dropping the keys off.

Returning to the track at 10am, we find that it did indeed rain overnight, for about 3 hours, but only lightly - certainly nothing like the traditional "pedal car monsoon" that assaults every 24 hour race. The dampness has cost a little time, but we're still just on the 66-hour schedule.

Refreshed from the night's sleep and in near-perfect conditions, Chris climbs in and immediately goes fast. His entire 40 minute stint is completed without a single lap over 79 seconds. 46 hours into the event, he's still doing 46 laps per hour pace, fast enough to have won races here, albeit in very good conditions. If this is impressive, it's positively eclipsed by Bill, who gets in and, apart from a minor shoe problem initially, is clocking 74s and 75s. That's still 48 laps per hour pace, as fast as any team has managed here in a race.

That shoe problem? Bill had forgotten to put his Look shoes on. If you've ever tried riding on Look (or SPD) pedals with normal trainers, you'll know it's uncomfortable, the pedals are slippery and it's very difficult to put any power down. Add to this the fact that the D-type's pedal box is very narrow, meaning Look shoes are essential to hold your feet in place and prevent them from hitting the frame every revolution, and you'll get some idea of the trouble Bill had on his opening lap. However, even when coupled with a complete stop and putting the right shoes on, his lap time was still only 108 seconds.

After Bill, it's my turn again and from somewhere I've picked up a little more - maybe it's the temperature, maybe it's the food, maybe it's the sleep; whatever, I'm back at 79-80 seconds per lap, only 2-3 seconds slower than I was going two entire days previously. Well, I'm impressed. Chris and Bill are having their own private lap times war. Well, Chris is having a war, his next stint run slightly faster than his previous one; Bill's simply going faster. By the time we finish the four hour shift, at 2pm on Easter Sunday, we've gained 30 minutes on our schedule - in four hours! We hand over to the other shift and while Chris and Bill choose to take a four-hour sleep break in one of the on-site tents, I decide to stay in the control booth to watch things progress. Brilliantly, "Goldfinger" is on ITV, as is the Grand Prix, so there's no shortage of entertainment. What the Guinness Saturday lad will think when he's watching the mass of video footage, we're not sure. The sight of a pedal car lapping once every 80 seconds or so, overlaid with the sound of formula 1 cars roaring past, must be a bit surreal. Just for good measure, "Days of Thunder" is on after the GP...

"63 hours or die"

Suitably refreshed, or possibly just delusional with mental exhaustion, Chris and Bill return to the control booth shortly before 6pm and announce they've agreed to a "63 hours or die" strategy and are going to really go for it in the closing stages. I comment that this might turn out to be "63 hours and die", but they're not put off. Fair enough.

It seems they weren't kidding either. Chris returns to the track at 6pm and immediately continues his lap times war, putting in 74s and 75s for the most part. 48 laps per hour pace. Bill really isn't interested in this war though, and spends the following 35 minutes lapping at 72 seconds per lap. 50 laps per hour. So ner. It's all I can do to keep to my 78s, before Chris returns and seemingly has cracked some, dropping to 76s then 77s. Just to rub it in, Bill gets back in at dusk and is banging out 73s, in a phenomenal display of speed, power and endurance. I slow a fraction more, but by the end of the 3 hour shift at 9pm, we're miles up on target, almost two hours ahead in fact. 63 hours is looking on after all, as by now the original calculations estimated we'd have tired to a mere 37 laps per hour. The whole team seems buoyed up by this performance and the other shift responds in kind, also putting in faster lap times than in their previous shift.

This is incredible to be part of. Well over 48 hours of racing gone, and we're accelerating!

At this point, I have a small confession to make. Remember the second night, when Chris went grass-tracking? Remember I said we'd all laughed at him?

Yes, I did exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason. Approaching 9pm, almost the end of my shift, I leave Molehill and look down to see the time on the clock as I know I'm getting close to handing over. Without realising, my subconscious has taken over and is homing in on the first light at the Fradley Hairpin. The first I know about it is the severe, thumping, vibration coming up through the seat, almost like I've left the circuit and I'm bouncing over some rough grass. Ah, hang on a minute. That's because I have left the circuit and I am bouncing over some rough grass! Well, I did say it was easy to do. Luckily it only cost 6 seconds on that lap and didn't damage the car at all...

After that, I crawl into the front seat of the Vectra, wind it as flat down as I can, slide into my sleeping bag and try to sleep for three hours. It seems I've only just got in when I'm rudely awakened by Jeremy telling me it's midnight and time to get up again. Or rather, when knocking on the window got no response he opened the door, at which point I nearly fell out into the cold night air. Certainly woke me up though.

The final midnight

Into Monday - at least according to our watches, which we'd deliberately left on GMT to avoid confusion - and the shift system is over. All six of us are now effectively on duty, with car time ready for anyone who can still pedal. This was always the plan; as it turns out we're all still capable of pedalling if required. Not only that, most of us can still speak lucidly as well. Bargain.

Once again, Chris tries to put one over on Bill; once again Bill is simply quicker by a good 3 seconds per lap. 60 hours completed and on a dark track, they're still doing 48 and 49 laps per hour, a tribute to the class of car they're driving and the months of training, but also a good indicator of how practise makes perfect. Remember the first night, when the Molehill was "turn right, count to four, turn left"? Well, it still is, except it's not 4 but more like 3.8 and we all simply know where the edges are, to the extent that we can navigate the corners, including getting hard up to the apexes on perfect racing lines, almost without looking. Certainly I'm able to concentrate on pedalling far more now than two days ago; I can genuinely feel and recognise every gradient and camber in the tarmac, slight though they are, and use them to guide the car into the turns reliably, consistently and extremely accurately, using the full width of the available tarmac each time. Not bad, in the dark.

It's not that warm again, but while everyone else is wearing tights and long sleeves, I'm still in the shorts I was wearing in the sunny afternoon. Partially this is indeed because my tights are still damp with sweat from, er, ages ago and I have no wish to put cold damp clothes back on, but also the shorts just feel right. I've no idea why, they just do. I've lost the previously invaluable gloves too, and it actually feels more comfortable.

Time wise, the best I can do in my final drive is 40 minutes at around 80 seconds per lap, which is still 45 laps per hour, which I'm reasonably chuffed about, before Jeremy takes over for his last stint. Half an hour later, Bill's back and we're just over 20 laps away from 1,000 miles. You wouldn't know it from the lap times. 72, 71, 73, 71, 73, 72... He's absolutely flying, and he doesn't drop below 73 for the whole 26 minute stint.

It's gone 2am, but we call Adrian who was keen to be here at the finish. Fortunately, for all Bill's speed, Adrian arrives with a few minutes to spare. Bill is still rocketing past the finish line with alarming frequency, shouting for distance remaining data as he does.

We tell him 10 laps remaining and his lap times go from 73s and 72s to 72s and 71s. We tell him five laps to go and he accelerates again, really burying himself for the closing few.

His last five lap times are 72, 71, 71, 69 and 69. Sixty nine seconds! Very nearly the fastest laps of the entire event, and they're the last two!

As Bill flies over the line for the last time, the clock stops at 62:38:26 - fantastic!

Finished!

Rather than doing a warm-down lap, Bill simply cuts the power to his legs and drops anchor sharpish. The four-pot hydraulic disc brakes bite down hard and the rear wheels lock up, so as Bill flicks the steering right, he completes a rather stylish handbrake turn in the darkness, before returning to the finish line where we're all going nuts.

First things first, a couple of team pictures in the blackness, then cameras away as the bubbly comes out. After spraying it around a bit, there's enough left for a couple of swigs for everyone. Besides, there's plenty on my coat if anyone's short.

We've actually done it! It wont sink in for a while, but we've done it!

Now it's Jeremy and Phil's turn for a confession.

"The Technical Department has a small confession to make", they say, before grabbing the car's right-hand wheels and tipping it onto its side. Written underneath in permanent marker is the legend, "If you can read this, it's all gone horribly wrong. P.T.O."

Back to the control booth and the first thing to do is "sign off" the video. 63 hours of VHS to watch, anyone? Then we shut down the laptop we've been using for the lap times, noting as we do so that to have Windows 98 and Excel run perfectly, without crashing, for 63 hours is probably also a World Record. After that, we take a tour of the site to kill all three generators (Bliss! Silence, after three days of throbbing...) before retiring to an assortment of tents and cars for a few hours sleep.

Breakfast

Somewhere around 7am, we're woken by the light of dawn. The food tent is a mess, although not as much of a mess as you might imagine after 3 days of continual use. As planned, we simply lock the control booth and then the circuit, then head up the A38 to the nearest Little Chef.

Bear in mind there's currently nine of us, we haven't shaved for three days or washed for at least the last 24 hours, it's about 8am (or rather, 9am BST), and it's Easter Monday. There's three staff on, normally probably enough for that time. I don't think they were expecting us...

However, a collection a breakfasts, steaks and side orders of chips later, we're feeling a bit better, so it's back to the circuit to clean and tidy up, pack everything away, and head home.

Fantastic.

Still want a go?

Despite the frequent use of the phrase "next time" during the event (as in, "Next time, we'll bring ...", "Next time, let's do ...") and a belief that we could, as a team, go faster given suitable conditions, this is not something GCR are going to do again.

Certainly, I can't conceive of a reason or cause good enough to persuade me to have another crack at the distance, now I know what's involved; therefore it's inconceivable that I would. Not only that, but we were so phenomenally lucky with the weather conditions (Friday night not withstanding) that we couldn't reasonably expect to get them any better on any other occasion.

Besides, we've done it now.

However, don't let that put you off if you're still determined - Great Central Racing will donate £100 to the charity of your choice if you mount an attempt at the record and complete the distance; additionally if you're a UK team you may well find that several of the PC1000 team will be on hand to offer technical and moral support.

You can use 6 drivers, one race-legal car (International Pedal Car Specification) and all the technical support you can muster; Your target time to beat is 62 hours, 38 minutes and 26 seconds.
1,000 miles is 1,609.4 km.

Sponsors:

Great Central Racing gratefully acknowledge the help and support of the following companies and organisations, without whom PC1000 would not have happened:

The Shenstone and District Car Club (www.curborough.co.uk) very kindly allowed PC1000 to use Curborough circuit for free, even going as far as cancelling a race meeting they would normally have held on Easter Saturday; PC1000 is very grateful for this.

Racelogic (www.racelogic.co.uk) lent PC1000 one of their hi-tech, GPS-based VBOX systems for the event for speed and distance measurement. The VBOX was successfully tested on the car during the February 25th test day at Curborough, producing some very interesting and useful data.

Travelodge, Burton-on-Trent (A38 Northbound) supplied two family rooms at reduced rate, plus gave complimentary continental breakfasts to those team members in the hotel at breakfast time.

HSS Hire shops supplied a assortment of equipment for the PC1000
record attempt, including three generators and an array of lighting equipment.

Phoenix (www.phoenix-comp.co.uk) is one of the UK's premier IT providers delivering a broad band of products and services to some of the UK's largest corporate, education and government organisations. Phoenix generously agreed to donate a Dell 17" PC monitor worth £200; this will be given away to one lucky private sponsor, in the prize draw to be held shortly and open to all those who sponsored at least 1p per mile (£10 total).