ROUND ONE MANBY MOTORPLEX 26.3.08

Well the start of a new rally season kicked of at the Manby motor sport complex with 41 challenge crews heading up to the north west. This will be a short write up because when you are competing in a single make series the emphasis is on good car prep, which we never had !! At the end of the rally in Holland the car had become very Smokey and the fault was found to be dodgy valve guides, so a engine re-build was booked, to cut a long story short the re-build was not completed in time, however the car was running but drastically down on power and torque, this soon became clear as other class cars were cruising passed us on the straights and we only managed to keep up with the 1.4 .
A bad day was made worst when we managed to come of SS8 a lap to early, and were given a stage maximum.

TURBO CENTRE TWYFORD WOOD 20.3.08

After such a bad start at Manby and with a fully well prepared car I was very keen to do this event, and wow what a difference as soon as a pulled away at SS1 I could feel the difference in power. With about 17 entries in class B we would have our work cut out to get a decent finish position up against more powerful machinery, clean and tidy was the order for the day and I nearly managed it in very wet, rough and slippery conditions. We like many other cars picked up a puncture on the first loop of SS5 and dropped about 40 seconds and then on SS6 we caught a escort who promptly moved over and waved me through (thanks car 66) but quickly realized I was to hot into a hairpin and over shoot and spun dropping about 10 seconds, but hey that was all I have to apologize for which is good for me!!
Gutted to loose 3rd in class by only 1 second, so 4th in class and 23rdO/A was a good result, bearing in mind that my brother John who co-drove on his first stage event suffered with sever motion sickness!! Yes severe he had his head out of the window puking on 7 out of 8 stages!! So drove blind for about 50% of the event so weirdly he said he had a great day LOL