Otterburn was an all tarmac rally on the Otterburn army ranges (between Newcastle and Edinburgh) - 110 miles in length - over double the length of rallies we normally do. On the Saturday we did the recce over about 50 miles (as some sections were repeated). It looked fast with a lot of blind crests and jumps and plenty of opportunity to have a big accident (the landscape was also littered with old burnt out tanks that they use for target practice). However, after all the prep for the rally at Goodwood I was feeling really up for it and confident of a good result. I got up early and took the car for a spin to get the tyres up to temperature so I could set the pressures roughly right so that when the tyres got up to temperature on stage 1 they would be roughly right (I'd never done this before but my research at Goodwood should have helped with this). The new brakes (discs and pads) that had been fitted the previous week didn't feel quite right as the car was pulling to the left under heavy braking. However, my service crew (BRS Motorsport) stripped the brakes down and put them back together before the start and the brakes were perfect. We were running car number 66, with Andy and Liza Fox running 30 seconds ahead of us in another BMW, car 65.

We shot off the start line and headed over a long straight undulating section for about 3/4's of a mile before the first corner. The first corner nearly caught me out as the tyres were not up to temperature and pressure yet so we took a rather sideways line around the corner. The car felt great over the next 4 miles and we could see Andy and Liza about 10 seconds ahead of us so we knew we were setting a good time. Then disaster struck - coming out of a square left turn, when I tried to change from second to third gear, the gear linkage broke leaving us stuck in neutral. We pulled over and jacked the car up and took a good look around but it was not going to be possible to fix it because the linkages had broken above the prop shaft so was not accessible without dropping down the gearbox and prop shaft. So that was it for us and to top it off I managed to burn my forehead on the exhaust while trying to fix the linkage. It was a 10p part that had broken but meant we were out of the rally.

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