Im Back

Well since the Dukeries, not much has happened really, which is a huge shame.

I did a road rally at the end of October, which was huge test of my strength and navigational skills..and the pressure really got to me. It had been 2 years since I had done a road rally, so the technique was a little rusty and we were running as Semi Experts.

The night started well, with using not having any problem or me making any mistakes, then I let myself down, and made the simplest of errors at a Cross Roads. With myself, frustrated the night just seemed to get worse, I mad silly little mistakes (nothing major) just time consuming. Anyhow, it was a long night, a little too long, and I cant remember much due to tiredness. We made it to the finish in 25th place which I was happy with.

I also did the G-O-N Cambrian Rally, based around Llandudno on the 3rd November with Paul in the 205. We were once again seeded last 1400, and going for the finish. We started at about 9:15 from the center of Llandudno, from here we had a 30min run too Pemachno, on this run out both myself and Paul, heard a weird grinding noise, the same one we heard on the Humberside. Thankfully, this noise soon disappeared, and we could concentrate on the stage.

Stage one, was a steady start which allowed Paul to get back into the swing of things since its over 7 months since his last event. We were pleased to get through stage 1 after seeing many cars off, some mechanical and some in sorry states. Stage 2 was alot better, we got into a good flow in the first half, but this was halted when we came across the rolled car of Gemma Wheeler, who was blocking the stage, thankfully she was ok and were ok to carry on. After this we got back into a good swing once again and started to get back on time with the cars around us.

Stage 3 was another good one, which again was halted when we had to do a 3 point turn to get round a very very tight hairpin left. This cost us around 20 seconds, which meant we had dropped another chunk of time to the cars around us.

Stages 4 and 5 we really enjoyed, the forest of cloceanog suited Paul alot more and he managed to get used to the car alot more, and started to carry more speed, and started to trust the tyres. We had no problems through these two stages and we headed of to 2nd service.

Stage 6 was a repeat of stage 1, this meant it was fairly rutted in places, but on the whole the stage was very smooth, and very grippy. This meant Paul really started to get going, and used alot more road and speed. Unfortunately there was steep hill halfway through the stage, and the small power of the car meant we lost time up the hill.

Overall we were happy with our rally and our finish. And as for next year, who knows....