Skoda Rally Blog

This week has gone very smoothly – I’ve been driving the car as much as possible, as whenever you’ve done something major no matter how much care you think you’ve taken, something can come loose or something unexpected can arise. But that hasn’t happened – the car hasn’t missed a beat, which is great, and this sense of calm meant that I almost didn’t feel as if the event was taking place – so often in the past the week before the rally has been fraught (especially as it’s usually in half-term, so I’m usually off and doing the car that week), but not so this year – an unusual situation in itself, but one compounded by our scrutineering time being later than usual at midday.

We loaded up my car (which is acting as service vehicle) and headed off to Canford Arena, where service is for the weekend. There was some disarray there (we weren’t on the service area plan!) leading to a delay before we could get set up. I say set up, I mean “get a tarpaulin out and put some wheels down to stop it flying away, and then sticker the car up. Time was tight, but fortunately the stickers have all got smaller this year (credit crunch?) so they went on easy enough, even more so as there was little wind there – Canford Arena is quite exposed and there’s usually a fair bit of wind down there, but it was still and sunny. Noise test was passed easily (93 dB, a full 7dB under the limit) and then we headed off to the Littledown Centre for scrutineering.

As anyone who’s read this before will know, Scrutineering is my least favourite part of rallying. I’ve never failed it and always check the car before the event, but it’s the last point at which an oversight could stop you competing, and I’m always nervous. However, scrutineering at the Sunseeker is made into a bit of an event (with the Littledown sports centre being used for it, and the public coming to see the cars be scrutineered and rally radio being broadcast from there). There was no need to worry, we passed OK (although needed to cover the battery + terminal as the cover had got lost), and then parked my car up outside, next to Marcus Dodd’s Accent WRC – a nice bookend of the field, but one I didn’t get a chance to take a photo of as I’d been collared by Robin Bradford to be interviewed for the Bournemouth University Rally DVD project, so I spent about 10 minutes being interviewed about starting rallying, doing Rally GB and so on, and hopefully gave them something to actually use rather than a bunch of gibberish!

Then we needed to do documentation, which is usually straightforward (and even bag us a couple of chocolates, nice people that they are), and then had to wait around for another interview, this time with Alan for the Rallye Sunseeker podcast. Spoke to Barrie Purrett (#76 in his Proton) who said he has a very noisy front wheel bearing. Hopefully he can get it replaced or it won’t fail as that would be a real pity, he’s a top bloke and someone whose times I’d aspire to.

The waiting for the interview was made much more pleasant firstly by seeing Murray Walker (who is tiny) and Louise Goodman (who is a lot thinner in person than on TV), and some rather interestingly-clad women  who were wearing “Turbo Dynamics” skin-tight blue and white suits. They seemed to be attracting a LOT of interest from the many photographers who were there (one of whom we caught taking a picture of her bum!), but then I guess that’s why they were there!

The interview with Alan was fun, covering similar stuff to the previous one, and this time Paul got asked a few things (which he wasn’t too keen on as he thought he’d get asked something techinical!) and then off we went, home. By now my back was pretty sore, so I need to do some ice treatment and make sure I don’t do anything stupid. This isn’t helped by the fact that I managed to rip the rear mudflap off when leaving this morning (thankfully it was still there when I got back), so I have to fit that…. aside from that we’re ready to go – we will be setting off from MC1 around 18:35, so we’ll be down there from about 17:30. First car is arriving at the gardens around 19:00, so we’ll probably be on the start line for 19:05. Nice.