We headed off at around 9am from London to Swansea Bay on 22nd. We had a scrutineering slot booked for 4.30pm so had left ourselves plenty of time to get there. In the end we got there at about 1pm.  We parked up in the large trailer park and unloaded the car. We then got the competition stickers and got them on the car. We also changed the wheels to use the set of tyres we had used on the test day - as this was not a round of the BMW challenge it did not seem to make sense to use a new set of tyres which could be saved for the next BMW event (a decision we would live to regret).  We got through scrutineering OK (apart from having to fit the front towing eye to the car) and headed off to our hotel.

The next day we headed off the start ramp at the rally start and set off to the first stage.  However, somehow we managed to take a wrong turn and end up in a farmers back garden. Needless to say he was not amused with all the dust we kicked up but that was not our main concern. Our main concern was that we could only be 15 minutes late all day before we got excluded and we could be excluded before we even started the rally! In the end we were 8 minutes late so we were OK.

Three things struck me on the first stage - 1) it was very fast, 2) it was very dusty, 3) the rear of the car was all over the place and was a real handful to control. At 80mph the car was stepping out at the back - and with trees either side of the road, this was a bit of a concern.  The first corner when I hit the brakes locked up the back wheels way before the front so I had to wind down the bias valve.  The first corner with the new hydraulic handbrake was interesting - it works slightly better than a normal handbrake so as a consequence we ended up facing the wrong way! However, by the last stage I had perfected the use of the handbrake - a quick flick and we were nicely sideways.

At the end of the first stage we met our management crew and they checked over the rear of the car to see if anything was obviously wrong and also checked the tyre pressures at the back (which were 28psi). Nothing seemed amiss so we headed off to the second stage. The marshal at the beginning of the stage warned us of a sharp bend by a pond and told us that he didn't want to see us joining the 4 cars already in the pond:

We headed off but again the car was handling very bad but we made it through the stage and then headed to the first service. We raised the tyre pressure to 29 to see if this would make a difference and swapped the rear tyres around.  The next stage was a short 3 mile stage but the car was worse than before and we ended up going off the road 3 times! I was not happy. We actually set the slowest time of any car on this stage. We then struggled through the next stage - a lot of logs and one nearly big accident. As we were heading down the track at about 80mph a warning light came on on the dash which I thought was the coolant (but later turned out to be a faulty sensor on the wash bottle). I distracted Wendy by asking her how far we were from the end of the stage and suddenly found ourselves approaching a 70 degree right bend FAR too fast. I hammered on the brakes and got the car sideways for the corner but we were heading straight towards a telegraph pole (I still don't know what this was doing in the middle of the forest!). I warned Wendy to brace herself as I couldn't see how we could miss it. As we got nearer I planted my right foot to the floor and somehow got some traction. I remember thinking 'phew it's going to miss Wendy's door and hit the rear door, and then that we might just hit the back of the car' and then somehow we missed it totally - it must have been by millimetres!

At the next service we put new tyres on the back and lowered the tyre pressures to 26 and the car flew. So much so that we actually caught the car in front until Wendy told me a 4 right followed by 5 left and I decided to leave out the 4 right so we lost about 20 seconds there. We also had another very near big accident. We came around a 1 right at about 80mph and the road dropped away slightly. Unfortunately, I totally lost control of the car here and we were sliding towards a pile of logs which not everyone else managed to miss:

We were all over the place trying to miss the logs and having missed these and still all out of shape had another set of logs on the other side of the track to try to miss. The many spectators gathered there indicated this was a prime accident spot. Somehow, I got us through this and fish tailed it up the road about 100 metres before getting back in control. We were going so well on this stage I was gutted that it was the end of the rally.  We ended up 39th out of 78 starters and were much quicker than last time out so we were pretty happy.

Co-Drivers View

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