Skoda Rally Blog

Last Tuesday, Steve phoned me and asked if I’d enter the Grass Autotest this Sunday. I said “yeah – why not?”. It obviously meant an early morning on the Sunday (and therefore not having a heavy night out on Saturday), but I thought I’d give it a stab. I then realised that the front struts were not quite right – the right one had sicked up all of its contents onto the suspension, and the left one was getting a bit weepy. To cut a long, painful story short, I ended up having to use seals that aren’t exactly right, and whoever had bodged the one before needs a clip round the ear! They’d over-tightened the strut cartridge top to try to make the seal work, which just meant I needed to buy special tools and sweat/swear a lot to get it open. Anyway, I fixed it on Saturday afternoon, which was good.

Sunday I went to find the fields we were in, and saw a variety of courses laid out, with maps and everything provided. It looked pretty complex, although walking the course did help a great deal, as did watching people go round while looking at the map and talking myself through the test. There were a total of 16 tests, and at the half-way point I was mid-way down my group, mainly due to getting a bit lost in one test and having to re-do one section to avoid a penalty. In the afternoon I made sure I didn’t do anything like that again, and had an absolute hoot, covering the car with mud and grass, and finding that it goes best if the engine is just stuck at 3000rpm and you do lots of handbrake turns! Even managed to do some left-foot braking on the practice course, although the back brakes are still a bit weak for that.

The results were posted, and I was amazed to find that I’d shot to first in class, seventh overall! I was best pleased! A cracking time was had for just ?15 for the day (plus jetwash costs, and also the fact that I managed to butcher the synchro on second gear during the course of the day, odd as I barely got out of first!), and I’m keen to do the next one on grass too….