Skoda Rally Blog

Today was the first day of recce – if you don’t know, that means driving the stages before the event, at “non-competetive” speeds and making notes of the stage turns and details so you can drive through them a lot faster, accurately and safely than if you were trying to do so without having pre-knowledge of them. Most rallies in the UK have pace notes provided by the organisers, but Rally GB has two days of “recce” where each driver gets to make their own notes. This has to be done in standard-looking cars (although some of the top boys are in essentially rally cars with full cages, etc), and many use hire cars – we saw several standard-looking cars today, and in my case it’s using my standard Felicia, just fitted with a sumpguard and a bit of protection for the brake and fuel pipes underneath, and some forest tyres fitted to it. Most people’s recce cars are worth more than my rally car cost (probably 3-4 times as much), so maybe that puts everything in perspective – if I had an Evo 9, I’d love to run it down the tracks, but I’d be gutted if it got as dented as the Fel did last year…

This year, the stages are mostly the same as last year – only Trawscoed is significantly different from last year (run in reverse) so this means that we needed to “refine” rather than start from scratch, which is a big bonus. Oddly the stages were split between “local” and Crychan, meaning a 40-mile drive for the second recce, but we got to the first stage just before it opened and found the usual queue, and surprisingly a comment of “well, you made it this far” from Mr. Kellitt…. Once we started up, two things became apparent – firstly that it’s a LOT more slippery than last year, and secondly the notes really didn’t need much work – Rheola was first to be done, and was just a case of adding in bits that had changed a little and getting the corners more accurate. After Paul’s constant complaints about the “descriptive” notes, we’ve changed to numbers (1 fastest, 6 slowest), which has meant he had to re-write all the notes, and a few got changed in the process or we’d messed up, but mostly it went OK, and well enough to mean we wouldn’t do the second run – it was quite tight and we’d also thought that being really tired for tomorrow would be a bad idea – reason being that driving the stage and calling every corner out is quite tiring mentally. One dodgy thing happened – we were in a bit of a “queue” of cars (I think the person about 6 in front was doing it for the first time judging by everyone else’s speed and that we were keeping up) and the idiot in car 64 pushed his way past us and everyone else, without so much as a second’s wait. Lovely. Anyway, we went off to Crychan, and it was much the same story there, only needing one run.

Next up was Resolven, which according to the books had changed quite significantly since last year, adding a section beforehand. The two year’s maps said otherwise, and so did our memory, and it was really a case of two distances and one corner, then back on the old notes. Lovely – ahead of schedule by a great deal, and an easy day ahead, hopefully.

Last up – Port Talbot, which was the first stage we recce’d last year, and therefore the first one ever. And it showed – the distances were crazily wrong for most of it, and several sections were just rubbish, frankly, so we needed to take a second run at it and totally replace the first section and modify a few other bits – not ideal for the first stage of the event, but I think the second run was OK, so it should be fine.

By this time, it was about 2:50, so we’d done well – if we’d done every stage twice we’d have missed the second run on Port Talbot and therefore had all sorts of trouble, so it’s all good. Apart from hitting a massive rock which dented the floor and sumpguard mounting and knocked my feet clear off the pedals, it all went OK, and the little Skoda has done OK. Paul’s been using Memory Map to record our progress on the stages, so we can see where we’ve been and also the speed at any point – interestingly it’s nearly been fast enough to finish the event on schedule, and Paul said it’s a pity we can’t use the recce car on the event as “at least it would finish”. Hopefully R477 will prove us doubters both wrong and keep it all together, but there’s always something, isn’t there?

Here’s the recce car, after a hard day’s work…