1925 STOCK TRIAL.

The preliminary regulations for the A.C.U. L000 Mile Standard Stock Motor Cycle Trial have now been issued. The Trial will be held from 26th April to 2nd May, and will consist of five days’ road work, and a sixth devoted to a comprehensive final examination. As the title suggests, the Trial is confined exclusively to new machines chosen at random from agents’ and manufacturers’ stocks, and resembling in every particular those sold to the general public. The Trial will start from Birmingham, the route for the first day consisting of some 200 miles of main road passing through a number of big towns in the Midlands and North, and finishing at Scarborough. For the remaining four days, routes radiating from Scarborough have been selected, increasing in severity as the machines are ” run in,” so that for the last four hundred miles, the competing machines will be asked to traverse comparatively difficult country.

The machines will be tested for reliability, hill climbing, silence, brakes and final condition, and in order to win a gold medal, ninety per cent, of efficiency is required in all the tests save for silence, when eighty per cent, is required. As however each mark deducted represents a loss of ten per cent., actually the standard of silence required is very high. Following last year’s practise, no secret checks will be used ; the route cards stating at which points checks may be taken. Two innovations appear in the marking, for whereas in previous trials “footing ” on a hill has always been reckoned as a complete failure, with a consequent loss of five marks, in this year’s Trial only two marks will be deducted for this offence, so far as the larger machines are concerned, and only one mark for 175 c.c. solos and 350 c.c. sidecars. In addition, the penalty for a passenger in a sidecar outfit not being properly seated is slightly reduced. In other respects the regulations follow almost exactly those which proved so .successful last year, but the experience gained in carrying them out should render the 1925 Stock Trial of even greater value to the potential purchaser of a motor cycle than was that of 1924.