Skoda Rally Blog

This weekend will see our furthest-away event, the Essex Charity Stages – not an event I’ve been to before. It offers 45 miles of stages for ?165, which compares very well to most multi-venue events, but that’s because it uses farm tracks and disused airfields, rather than mind-meltingly expensive Forestry Commission tracks.

Being a navigator has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. With one exception, and that was today. I had to get us some accomodation, and spent a fruitless hour on the Internet and phone trying to find us somewhere within a decent distance of the event, and finally did. I hate using the phone, so making 20 pointless phone calls wasn’t a great way to spend half the morning. So I spent the rest of it fixing the car (various little things here and there, nothing major), and making sure it’s all OK. So far, so good.

But there are a few challenges this weekend. Firstly, it’s my first multi-venue event navigating, which should be OK, but I have NO IDEA what the road books, etc, will be like – usually you get the road book (which tells you where to go throughout the day) by post, so you can peruse it before the event (or in Paul’s case, ignore it completely!), but we’ll be getting this when we sign on, probably around 8am on Sunday morning. So no time to plan anything else. And the paperwork I’ve had so far looked, well, let’s say it was a bit sparse, and leave it at that.

Next problem – there are two service areas. This is something that always causes me a problem, because we don’t ever have a service crew. So what we do is leave the Pajero in the service area with all the stuff (OK, a toolbox and some spare wheels) in it. But when you have two service areas, you can’t do that. Well, you can, but if you need something and you’re at one and it’s at the other, you’re stuffed. This happened on Newton Abbot stages last year, but luckily there was no drama. So we’ll have to be uber-careful to not need anything at Service 2. And carry a couple of spare wheels and a few choice things in the toolbag of doom in the back of the car. What I really need for occasions like this is Sport Billy’s bag. That would do nicely.