Skoda Rally Blog

When we first saw the schedule for this event, today was always going to be the most demanding of the pre-rally days.  In previous years, Wednesday has seen recce and documentation, with scrutineering on the Thursday.  However, this year scrutineering was moved to the Wednesday evening, making for a far busier day; this was compounded by the original closing of scrutineering at 10pm being moved to 7pm – I had asked for the latest slot, and got it, but it still made for a very busy day.  We set out at a slightly frosty 6:30 to get to the first stage, Monument Hill, which is on the Epynt army ranges, and as it turns out uses a lot of the “Epynt” stage from previous years in reverse.  We got there in good time after some cunning cross-country work by Paul (having seen number 45 tank it past us on the road, an hour later than he probably should have been), so had time to go and get some fuel and still get there with plenty to spare.  In the queue we had a bit of time to talk to people I know from the britishrally.co.uk forum, including Duncan who is navigating and Nick and Simon who are in the Fiesta – nice to finally put faces to names, as well as compare notes about this, that and the other.  However, we were talking too much as we realised everyone ahead of us had gone, so we dived into the car and off we went!

The stage went pretty well – it starts with some tarmac, but soon drops onto gravel on a long downhill (which is the uphill section where the throttle stuck open in 2007), and the rest of the stage is good, and not too slippy – today the weather was perfect – sunny and with no wind, so the tracks were probably drier than they will be when we actually rally on them.  But the stage itself went well with no major dramas, just refining the notes as we went; it was interesting to follow behind Tom Cave for a while and see the kinds of lines he was taking; granted it’s only recce but it’s worth following for a while, although he let us past and then we went a bit quicker (he wasn’t slow even though he’s making notes from scratch!) – the general plan has been to drive them a bit quicker to get a feel for how we’re going and this worked well.

Next up was Four Ways Crychan, which has a long tarmac section and then into the “usual” Crychan gravel stage.  This is one thing I was really concerned about because driving on forest rubber on tarmac isn’t ideal, but doing this helped a lot – the roads have a LOT of rocks about on insides and outsides of bends, and making an error here would be severely punished (probably with a retirement, given the size of the rocks), so it was good to go over all this.  Going into the gravel stage was great because it’s one of my favourites of the event, with long flowing sections as well as tight stuff, and most of it is smooth and grippy (although there are some bits where it’s covered in pine needles, so if you go off-line then you are going to go off pretty quickly), so it was a great end to a long stage.

Finally for this group, Halfway – again a stage I really like – it starts out with a forest section which is initially very fast (even for us, being very careful of the speed limit), and then a tighter section, and finally out on to the epynt plains, with quicker roads and some areas where rocks would be your undoing again, so accuracy is important.  Once again, even in the little (gutless) recce Felicia it was easy to be up to the speed limit, and doing this sort of stuff really improved my confidence a lot.  What didn’t was the noise coming from under the car – the sumpguard had bent and had part of it pointing down to the ground, which wasn’t easy to sort out with the tools available, so I just cable-tied it out of the way, which worked until the ties got broken (about 4 feet into the next stage), and eventually it wore away in the road section and wasn’t a problem then!

We finished all these stages a fair way ahead of the schedule, so went round again for another run of them, and improved once more, with fewer errors and more speed; the GPS speed alarm has been a real boon not only in terms of keeping on the right side of the law, but also realising that we’re going faster each time.

Next, onto Resolfen, one of Sunday’s two repeated stages.  We got there in good time, and had lunch involving more Pot Noodle, etc., this time made in the car as we went.  Fortunately Paul didn’t spill any, and he had his hat so today was far less embarrassing!

Into Resolfen and it started out running along the side of the mountain, so there are a fair few drops to not drive straight off of (thanks again Paul!), and it’s one of those things where you have to get a grip and say “well, I’m not GOING to drive off, am I?”, and get on with it… The rest of the stage went well, and given the tight timetable we decided that we’d only do one run, so set off for Margam….

…. and ended up at Resolfen!  There was a “navigational error”, which meant we got back to the stage start, and only realised this when we passed where we’d stopped for lunch (as we’d come the other way), so we were further away from where we needed to go than when we started.  Paul plotted a new route, which actually saved us a lot of the time we’d lost, so we got to Margam pretty easily, aside from having a massive moment on the way in where there was a really bad cross-road rut which beat the hell out of the front of the car!  Once we got to the stage itself, it went pretty well – it’s not somewhere I’ve been before and had some real variety with some tricky bits thrown in, including a 5 Left with a bump which ended up with us spinning (and having a good laugh about it), and an error in the Margam park itself which must have looked quite comical from the outside, if not totally inept!  This and a couple of other things really demanded a re-run, so we went back again, and it went much better.

So, that was it for the forest stages, the little Felicia has survived FOUR rally GBs now, without missing a beat.  Just a drive to Cardiff and for the recce of the Cardiff Bay stage.  We got there ready for 5pm, when it opened for us, but had to wait for the bridge to open and close before we got across.  I was quite surprised to find that the stage was all smooth tarmac, so we made proper notes, although the jump that’s been put in there looks like it’ll be quite a challenge for the Felicia – I’ve not had any real experience of jumping the car, and I’m not sure that I want to get it wrong as the first stage on Thursday! The rest of the stage seemed OK, but we didn’t have time to do another run – rush hour traffic and the fact we’d STILL not got the tracker put paid to that.

So…the tracker.  Interspersed in today were a few phone calls about it (leading to no real progress), a visit to the ISC truck (no-one was there, it was unlocked), and finally someone walking round the service area asking if we had ours, and Paul having to go and get it from them, where they said we had gone to the right truck (there was a claim of otherwise), but apparently “Dave” may have “gone to McDonalds”.  Useless.

There were a few last things to do on the car (some of which I’d forgotten, some of which were easy, but I needed to drill the head for the sealing wires), and then off to noise.  But the car wouldn’t run properly, so a change of plugs was needed (if it’s started a few times and not fully warmed it will foul them, so I have plenty of spares, thankfully).

So, this left us with about 10 minutes to fit the tracker, with me already having passed noise test and driven to scrutineering.  A mad panic to get it done involving Ian and Al (our newly-arrived service crew) coming with tape and a multimeter saw it done, just in time, so I drove round the corner into scrutineering… to find a MASSIVE QUEUE!  No need for panic, as it happens, so just the terror of scrutineering itself, having whiled some time away talking to Keith and Paul from the rally forum.  My least favourite thing; it’s like having an exam, going to the doctor and seeing the head teacher all in one.  The last hurdle before we do a rally.  I’ve never had a problem before, but there’s always a first time.  The queue got shorter and eventually we got in, got the car weighed (a huge 994Kg, built solidly I reckon!), and then into the bay.  A few raised eyebrows about things on the car that turned out to be OK, and a joke about the homologation having “only hours to run”, and eventually the Felicia was scrutineered OK.  Then we had to get our helmets, HANS devices, race suits, boots and underwear all checked, with labels being put on the helmets and HANS devices as well as records of everything kept.  And then we were DONE.  The relief was unbelievable for me – everyone else had kept joking with me to keep my mind off it, but it was a real relief to know everything was OK and we were actually going rallying.