A last minute change to the venue saw the rally HQ moved from Newton Abbot to Newquay in Cornwall with the 17 forest stages held in and around Bodmin Moor. It was originally going to be a two day rally with the second day being tarmac stages but unfortunately that was cancelled 6 days before the event.  

The day of the rally did not get off to best start when the car developed an oil pressure problem on the way to the start line. However, the lads from BRS Motorsport, who provide on event support for the car, fixed the problem with about 10 minutes to spare before we were due on the start line.  Also, 3 of the 6 wheels we had with us were leaking air so we didn't have a full set of good tyres to use and no tyre supplier in sight to fix the problem.  Fingers were crossed that we did not get a puncture!    

A few minutes before our 9.45 start time the heavens opened and continuous rain for the next three hours meant the already muddy forests were really slippy.  Rather than using pace notes, this rally used Ordinance Survey maps.  This meant that Wendy's job was made that much harder as she had to read the directions for the corners, severity of the corners, and contours of the roads from the maps.  We started pretty cautiously as it was our first foray on wet mud and also the first time reading from maps.  However, we soon built up a good rhythm and set 15th fastest time on stage 6, and only a few seconds off the pace of the lead BMW's.  By stage 7, the cloud base had dropped reducing visibility to less than 50 metres in places.  Unfortunately, on stage 7, a re-run of stage 6, saw us slide wide on a long sweeping left hand bend.  This put us onto all the really slippery mud that had been cleared off the racing line.  Once we hit that there was only one way we were going and that was off into the mud at the side of the track.  We ended up stuck in mud which required us to be towed out.  This adventure cost us 2 mins 25 seconds and dropped us from 28th position down to 49th.  As a consequence of the excursion, despite causing no damage to the bodywork, a brake warning light had come on which was a bit of a cause for concern.  A 40 minute delay at the start of stage 12 whilst a medical team tended to a crew that had had a close encounter with a pile of logs meant that proceedings were running late and as a consequence, stages 16 and 17 were run in the dark.  This was another new challenge for us, especially as we had no auxiliary lighting on the car  We managed to come through it unscathed but did drop a few seconds on cars that had auxiliary lighting.  We managed to recover some time over the last 10 stages, climbing to 41st position just 18 seconds behind the next BMW.

In summary, it was a really fun rally which saw us competitive at times.  If it hadn't been for the off we had it would have been a respectable result for us.  Roll-on the next rally in 5 weeks time where hopefully we can redeem ourselves.

Co-Drivers View

Coming soon........

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