Made it to Saturday scrutineering after coming from Leyland with minutes to go before it closed. Arrived in the hotel safe in the knowledge that the car was ready and I had new tyres for the event.
Sunday morning and its raining! Standing water meant that we fitted road/rain tyres. After the first (late) stage we had the Pug flying over the puddles (re: lakes) and finished in 16th O/A. This looked good as everyone else must have slicks/ inters on?
3 Trackrod crews were out in the Larkspeed league event and all made it round safely. For one stage it dried up so I could finally fit my new slicks. Incredible. Why have I bothered with remoulds up to now? The front end grip was amazing giving very good turn in so that throttle could be applied all the way around the corner instead of playing with it trying to balance sliding and grip!
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, it rained again so the wets were put on again.
Now, we found ourselves in front of a Subaru at one point and whilst negotiating a tightening 90 left through chicane I decided to keep left out of it to let it past. Only thing is the Scooby had cut the chicane over the grass and was heading for my N/S door! Very disconcerting. We followed this anus for a while until it disappeared into the 'Box'. As we entered it we saw it cutting the whole box out and going through the other side. We continued correctly but the Scooby had gone. On consultation with The Clerk he said that he knew of the problem and would talk to the crew.
At the end of the meeting we had another talk and found that he had been let run with the proviso that they would not be included in the results as the turbo wasn't sealed. They didn't take a max like they had said and the results stood even though they had course cut blatantly (a marshal had reported them as well) and driven dangerously on at least one time. This is the first real situation that I have encountered in my rallying time and hope it will be the last but reflects badly on the organisers as the offending crew has quite obviously got away with it! It's a bad situation for us that try to keep to the regulations and rules and I hope that this is in fact a one off occurrence as other wise there may be some nasty 'accidents' when we are all on the limit out there.
That said as the results stand we finished 17th (16th in reality) and 7th in class again. Apart from the rain and being soaked whilst changing wheels the day was highly enjoyable (apart from the waiting at stage start due to delays with the track every stage) and Trackrod got good results for the Larkspeed League with Caroline and Michelle finishing 3rd in class, Derek Marshal and John McNichol 3rd in class and us.
G.Steggles