Skoda Rally Blog

OK, first up this will be brief – today has been a VERY long day and with a not-too-great outcome, so it is late, and I am very tired and not in the best frame of mind – so apologies for this, it’ll be more “bullet points” than long text – I will come back and flesh it out later on, honest!

So, with that in mind:

We set out about the same time, got the car out of Parc Ferme and all was well – got to service and loaded up for the day, and set off on the long road section to the first stage, Radnor 1.  This was the first stage we recce’d, and seems a LONG time ago now.  The road section was pretty easy on time, so we got near the stage entry and parked up with some other cars, and had a break, watching others come through.  One notable thing was one rally car reversing into another one when he missed his junction, and didn’t even stop to apologise or anything!

The stage itself went really well – the car was running well, although it wasn’t happy on part throttle (misfiring) it was revving out OK, and the stage was good as it was bright and sunny, with LOTS of spectators about, and the condition of the stage was good.  I got into a good rhythm pretty much straight away, and I felt it went really well all over, aside from the very end of the stage, which was really muddy, and I ended up totally off the line in the field instead of on the track, but I don’t think I was alone in that from the tracks I saw.

The road section to the next stage, Monument Hill 1 was fairly long, during which Paul came up with a theory that there aren’t actually many sheep in Wales, most of them are plastic dummies as they never move.  He also renamed one of the towns we went through as “Pillow”.  We had a bit of time spare when we got there too, and again watched the big boys pass us by, before going into the stage – here we are on the stage start:

Again this went well, with the car running OK, and the downhill sections getting it pretty much flat in top gear; gripping stuff aside from the shadows we went into making it hard to see where corners started.  But again, it went well, and we had a few “moments”, but nothing serious; it just felt like I was getting something like the most out of the car.

Next up was Four Ways Crychan – here we are on the start line again:

This stage had worried me before, being half tarmac and then the classic forest stage (one I really like), but I needn’t have worried too much; yes, the tarmac was really slippy where it had mud dragged onto it, but for the most part it was pretty much as you’d expect, despite being on gravel tyres and suspension.

It was certainly LONG though, and then we were into the gravel section, which I loved; I was really getting confident and happy to keep the speed up on the longer sections with 1 and 2 corners, some of which were pretty slippy, but the car went where it should do, once you told it to!

We got caught by the Swift (2 cars behind us) towards the end, but it worked out OK for both of us, and again I felt I’d done a good job; most of the corners had been taken at decent speed and again lines round slower stuff were improving as was the speed.

Finally in the loop was Halfway, one of my favourite stages which has a great forestry section to start, and then open army range roads to finish; while the car could definitely do with more power for them, it was great, most of the time the speed was kept up, and sections which I’d had problems with before went well; the middle bit with some difficult corners and rally-finishing rocks nearby was taken with some caution but still with a reasonable bit of speed.  Again, I thought I’d done a decent job and so did Paul.

The weather was good, the stages were going well, and for the most part the car was too.  The only issue really was a part-throttle misfire which came and went; sometimes it would be OK, other times it would be quite bad.

Lunchtime service was at Builth Wells again, and we got a good spot, having arrived nice and early allowing consumption of a fine hot dog while waiting to book in, and comparing stories with Nick West in the Fiesta while we were in the regroup.  Service went without any real issues, and we were back out again soon enough.

The re-run stages were much rougher than usual as the National B rally had also run over them, leading Radnor to be a bit cut up and very slippy at the very end; it wasn’t as bad as we’d been told, but certainly in a few places it was hard work and hard on the car, although it seemed OK about it!

Monument Hill 2 was also fairly cut up in places, although the change of sun meant that some of it could be taken quicker and with more confidence than before; a bit of cloud meant that there wasn’t the bright sun/shade leading to a bit more confidence from me, and some good fun had while out there.

Crychan 2 was quite testing; as soon as we started there was a nasty “knock” whenever on/off the throttle, which I thought was a gearbox mounting, and in addition I thought the gearbox had broken, but this was from someone else’s smell in places! (Not Paul, I hasten to add).  Got some of the corners really good though, and although we got caught by Nick towards the end of the forest section, I still think it went well; its quite difficult doing the tarmac section in the dark as a lot of your information comes from peripheral vision, etc., but I still enjoyed it.

And then Halfway 2.  Again, this was in the dark; before we went in I just checked that the gearbox wasn’t broken (it wasn’t, so I think it was just a mounting having given up), and then in we went.  I think this went really well; I decided that I needed to properly commit to the notes as they had all been good and trustworthy beforehand, and the end result was a run which felt good, and was confirmed by the time we got – the marshal at the end said we’d done really well!

Then it was time to head to Cardiff, and a long, long road section.  And here things started to go wrong; the part throttle issue became an issue in all situations at one point; about 60k out I had real problems keeping the engine going at all, but then it suddenly seemed to sort itself out, firing up OK and running perfectly again.  But with about 10k to go, it died again on the A4232, and I was convinced we wouldn’t make it even off the road; at one point we were doing about 20mph with no power from the engine, and only a lot of frantic effort got us to a petrol station.  I checked everything over while Paul got some WD-40 and we cleaned up all the connections we could, and I checked that the throttle body pot was working (as I thought this may be the problem) – it was OK.  Went to start the car up, and it ran perfectly – no problem at all.  We got to the stage arrival without incident and then booked in, and waited for the stage which was about 40 minutes as the normal 1 minute gaps became 2 for this stage.

Eventually we took to the stage, and were off; the start went much better than Thursday (due to having decent fuel in the car), and so did the chicane – partly due to commitment and partly because someone had already taken a fair chunk out of it.  We had decided to give it a bit more of an effort over the jump as we’d be flatter, and we did this – not crazily fast, but with a bit of speed.

BIG mistake.

Now, I don’t think we went quickly over it, but when we landed the back of the car bounced really high into the air, and although I controlled it (or Newton’s laws did, more like), it was quickly apparent that something was wrong – VERY wrong.  The back of the car had no grip, and was just bouncing up and down; Paul kept calling the notes, but I said that a) something was wrong and b) I was an idiot for not taking it easy; I really don’t think we went mad over it, but it had broken something really badly.

We bounced through the rest of the stage and then got to the car wash near the service check in, and I got out to have a look (while a Japanese lady took pictures of the car).  It was soon obvious what had happened – one of the hoses on the rear suspension (which hold all the oil and pressure of the damping) had broken – it had just burst!  I’m not sure what happened, but the right-side one had come loose – I didn’t think that anything could foul them (and there’s no other way to fit them), so I guess I’ll have to analyse that further later on….

I was devastated.  Game over.  Or was it?  Hopefully not; a plan was hatched to rob the rear shocks from the recce car, and carry on with that setup – it had done 4 recces of Rally GB, so why not?  The boys soon had them off of the recce car, and it reminded me of when C3PO offers his parts to fix R2D2…

We checked out of the ‘dead zone’ and into service, and amazingly we got the rears done, tankguard reattached, horn fixed, a few other bits and pieces and check-tightened the gearbox mountings again (the bush has failed, so nothing we can do really).  And Al was still bolting the sumpguard up as we went to leave, but the misfire returned – the car would barely move, and this was what I’d wanted to fix while in the service before the rears died.

We tried to drive to Parc Ferme but it was so slow I thought it would be better to book in late rather than have a car that won’t run tomorrow.  We spent a frantic 20 minutes trying to find out what was wrong (and found nothing we could see – fuel pressure OK, plugs OK, all connections OK, ECU happy with everything), but changed the plugs anyway, it seemed OK-ish on the road (but clearly randomly rather than actually fixed) and booked into Parc Ferme for the night.

Went back to service, packed away in the rain, came back here, felt deflated.

So, I have no idea if the car will even start, let alone move tomorrow.  I’m gutted; it was all going so well, and I was really wanting to give the Felicia a good send-off, but it looks destined not to happen.  We are out at 07:18, and will see how it goes; if the car runs like it did earlier today then everything will be fine, but we really don’t know what’s wrong, and dont have much time to find out; we are going to take as many spares as we can and then take it from there.  Wish us luck, we will need it.