Harold Palin rally 12/10/02
Car 17

No service crew, no trailer, no tow vehicle! Looks like we'll have to drive it there......and back!

Ear plugs in and off to the start, through scrutineering and ready for the off. To make matters worse it was raining and I had to keep the car in one piece! Manby showground can be slippy in the dry let alone the wet. It was. 1st stage and we were slow. I knew this because I was exclaiming in the intercom, "why are you braking here" to myself. Emma found it amusing. I often found myself accelerating back up to speed for the oncoming hairpins. The car was handling well in the conditions though with no rear lock up. I was on knobblies, as I had no other tyres with me, and this may have helped. The car did not go up in the air all day and I only checked the water and fitted the ignition and fuel relays properly to the inner wing in service.

Lorraine Leeming blew her 1600 Escort up whilst 1st in class. I tried to console her with what everyone uses with me, "Well, thats rallying", if a look could give a black eye I would be needing a piece of steak now! Maybe this phrase should be struck from the rallying vocabulary?

We were hovering around the high 20's O/A and I was getting a little dejected when I suddenly realised that I was driving it home! Who else was doing that? No one I saw any way. It was obvious I wasn't going to be as fast as I could be. This in mind I started to relax and, guess what?, ENJOY the event! I played with the drifting around long 90's, smiled at the speccies in handbraked hairpins, waved down the straights and slowly went up to the low 20's O/A.

On the last stage Emma and I were in fits of laughter playing to the speccies after realising that although only a few seconds off 21st O/A we were nowhere near next in class so just tootled round. We ended up 22nd and 6th in class after a very wet day, but as we were off home the sun came out. Does this go to show the old addage that more haste equals less speed? Or was it that loads of crews crashed! which then leads me back to more haste..........