Malta 2014

Having visited Malta on many occasions Mark had his eye set on competing in the International Fireworks Festival held their every year and after a few nice emails to the committee we were finally selected to participate in the 2014 festival against the following teams.

St. Joseph fireworks factory of Malta, SteyrFire of Austria, Brezac artifices of France and Pyrotex of England.  Everyone had told us it was near impossible to win in Malta as history almost always saw a Maltese team awarded first place and no UK company had ever won or even been placed in the competition which was enough ammunition to give Mark the ambition to create a show that was capable of winning the competition purely on design as he knew we would be over powered by other teams purely on shell size alone!

The first day on site got off on the wrong foot due to the mortar layout being incorrect but work soon got underway around 11am and by 11pm we had set up most of the display, don’t worry the crew were well looked after on site and had a big hearty Italian feast for lunch which kept them happily going throughout the afternoon into late evening.

The second day on site was a little easier for us all as we only had to drop the shells and then run tests. It was a nice change for the crew who had the chance to have a chat with the other teams and compare each other’s shell sizes! The Maltese certainly came up trumps with theirs as the biggest ones in their display were 16”.

Two teams fired there displays before us so we were naturally anxious as there is always the possibility that our show could be taken out by their display and this was escalated further with all the small fires that had sprouted up around the site from the fall out but luckily there was two fire engines on standby for these eventualities and they were extinguished quickly and efficiently with zero impact to our display.

At 10:30pm our display was given the green light and we commenced to fire the show. The audience loved it, especially the false finale before the main finale of corolla to blue shells, it was amazing! The crew and Mark were all happy with how the display fired but we had to wait until the following night for the results.

After watching the closing displays put on by the Maltese that were amazing, it was time to find out who had won the competition, then the names were then read out from third to first. Malta in 3^rd, Austria in 2^nd and in 1^st place UK. It was us, Pyrotex Fireworx, we had done the impossible! The crew and Mark were over the moon with the results and quite rightly so.