We stayed in the room next door to the one we stopped at last year and anyone reading last years report will know we were kept awake by banging water works all night. Well you guessed it, it hasn't been fixed! I awoke with a banging head and hardly any sleep, feeling very poorly.
The event was meant to use the loose again but due to rain it was abandoned again. This was lucky for us as we had no knobblies. The whole event was done on road 'wets'. After stage one I was 18th overall but stage 2 turned out to be slippier than 1 and mistakes were made. During the day my head went from bad to worse and the event was run with the usual delays. Even when not turning the stage around we were kept waiting at the time control.

Having grabbed a couple of minutes of sleep Emma woke me to tell me that we had 2 minutes to get to the control. As we drove through the service area at under 20 mph a Safety marshal decided to flag us down to bolok us for speeding in an area where young children and dogs were roaming??? Now forgive me if I'm wrong but shouldn't young children be supervised and dogs be on leads especially in the service area but on events in general? She then proceeded to tell us that there were children using roller blades in the vicinity…..! I kept quiet through this hoping she would get to the end of her lecture so we could book in and left after listening but not being drawn into an answer only to book in on time to find that there was a 50 minute delay! We put this down to the fact that due to the lost miles on the event it would finish earlier and the organisers had to sell the food at the barbeque they had booked at the old later finish time and promptly had a 20 minute sleep in the car.
The stages were drying out at various points which allowed the faster cars to put the power down and we slowly went backwards but still finished in 24th O/A 10th in class. I felt a little bored at this venue and will have to think hard about attending again but maybe that was because I felt so rough through lack of sleep?
Next one at Leconfield on the Sea King stages and I may have a secret weapon for that one.

G.Steggles