Thursday 29th November
After a couple of long, VERY tiring, days of recce we were finally at the start of the event. The Thursday on RallyGB for most crews means scrutineering and the ceremonial start.
Scrutineering went remarkably easily (as should be the case), with no issues, not even small ones that quite often try to stress crews out. So after scrutineering we had some spare hours before we had to get ourselves and the car to the centre of Cardiff and present ourselves in the start ramp queue. I must admit to being a bit over excited; and worried about missing our slot that I mucked up Chris, Andy and Peter by not letting us have a final nice meal before the hectic activity of the rally started.
Finally - it was our turn - and I was on the start ramp of my first WRC event as a driver... and I promptly stalled the car on the ramp in my hurry to get out and stand by the machine. What a prune. Luckily it was not the most embarrasing start ramp incident. I was told that one crew forgot to put the handbrake on, stepped out the car, which then proceeded to roll down the ramp on its own.
After lots of smiles and sort of being interviewed we were off and officially in the rally! There were still quite a few spectators hanging about to see the cars at the back of the field. It was great to be driving past the crowd, smiling and waving back.
Friday 30th November
The upside of being so far back in the pack is that we did not have a super early start, which meant we did not have a rush to get to the service park. This was a blessing and a pain - since when we did turn up some other teams had annoyingly filled our service area with their spare and discarded road cars. So 10mins of pain was endured as I stomped around getting the teams responsible to shift the cars.
The other "not so good" fact was that the weather was appalling. It was very windy and VERY rainy. So the fact that we did not have any sort of weather protection (the service van and easy-up we were borrowing fell through at the last minute) meant a very basic service setup for us. The good news is that we had managed to blag the space next to the team of Fin McCaul and Neil Burgess; so at least had friends close to hand.
After filling the car up with go-faster-juice (very expensive FIA fuel) we set off to our first stage: Port Talbot 1.
At the stage start it was VERY foggy, and very wet. So we set off into the first stage, on my virgin pace-notes, and almost immediately came to grief. About the 5th corner into the stage is a deceptive right hander with a large bank on the outside; that on the WRC TV coverage quite often shows the big boys either hitting or spinning (I think Solberg had a biggish moment there a couple of hours before us).
I came into the corner way too fast, thinking I was somewhere else, and collected the bank with the nearside rear of the car with an almight bang. For a few seconds I really thought I had knackered our rally after only 20seconds - but after a few seconds the mud/stones that had filled the rear wheel cleared and the car felt fine. Phew!
We had bad news at the first major junction though, when we were shown a yellow flag - meaning an incident on the stage. This means the stage has been neutralised so we need to proceeed to the end non-competitively and watch out for emergency vehicles on the stage. After a few minutes (luckily on a narrow section) the car that started behind us caught us at speed as I was driving slowly with the hazards on. It turns out they did not realise what the yellow flag signified and had kept going at competitive speed. They were reprimanded by the Clerk of the Course in an official bulletin later.
The next two stages went OK, if not driven amazingly well. I was being relatively cautious (no bad thing) since I definately wanted to get to the end of the event; rather than proving how quickly I can go - before falling off.
We headed back to the Swansea sea-front for our first service, and the rain was hammering down - well more precisely hammering across - since the "trees were really sneezing".
After a quick fix up of the rear corner I had bashed, and some general light tinkering we were ready for our Second run of Port Talbot. It was still very foggy, and still very wet... and I made the exact same mistake, hitting the exact same bank, in the exact same spot as my first pass. Admittedly it was slightly less of a hit since I did realise I was making the same mistake about 1second earlier this time around. The upside of it is that it at least shows I was driving to the pace-notes - the downside being that the notes were obviously not good enough for the conditions.
Annoyingly about 1km from the end of the stage I got off the clean line on a downhill into a medium speed corner, which meant I was not slowing the car down quickly enough so took the decision to finish slowing down rather than trying to get around the corner - which might have ended up being worse than where we actually ended. We slowly slipped off the outside of the corner into a deep ditch/hole a couple of feet from the edge of the stage. Chris thought we were stuck for good - but I was convinced we were getting out (I never got out the car so do not know how bad it looked from the outside :-)
For once I had good luck though. Two marshals were working on that corner, and two Dutch spectators appeared after a few seconds too. With Chris and the four of them pulling on the two rope; and me revving the nuts off the car with the centre diff locked; we popped out of the hole after probably only losing 5 minutes. Whew! It was then that I finished the stage in a sheepish manner; because my local car club (Cambridge) were manning the flying finish and stop line - so I had to turn up to a lot of people I knew explaining that we had spent time in a ditch only a few corners before the finish.
Sadly the next stage, Resolfen 2, was to be our downfall. The fog was still very thick - but now it was well and truly dark. I must admit I was really enjoying the challenge of the stage, since we did not have front fog lights (front corner pods) so I did most of my driving of the stage with the lights turned off. If I turned on even the dipped headlights it just brought the fog to the end of the bonnet and nothing could be seen. It was fun (if slow) driving in almost pitch blackness navigating through the stage by feel and the ghostly shape of the trees about 20m above us. It only became a real problem when there were no trees by the edge of the road; as I found out when we reached a hairpin right. I knew roughly where it was so decided to turn into it - and was mostly correct :-)
I ended up driving across the apex of the hairpin, bumping down back onto the stage probably about 20m short of the actual apex :-)
After what felt like a really long distance (turned out to just be 5km) we pulled onto a longish uphill straight; and I was powering through the gears when the car just lost power. There was no warning; no lights flickered; no pops; no bangs ... just a lack of power. After coasting for a bit we pulled into a layby and started trying to diagnose the problem. No connectors seemed to be undone, no fuses blown or tripped. The car however did not have a spark; and the fuel pump was not running - so we thought it was just a fuel pump failure so decided to wait until we could be recovered. It was pouring with rain and blowing a gale - but for a couple of hours I stood outside showing the OK board (could not find anywhere to place it where it would not have blown away) until we were eventually recovered. Unfortunately the service boys met us after another bit of a delay; but without the trailer. We could not get the car started - so I had to sit in it freezing for another couple of hours until Chris came back with the trailer. So after the car dying about 16:30, I was finally in a warm tow vehicle about 23:00. A long day.
A friend commented that he had never seen me so miserable, and I must admit that I have never been that cold and wet in my whole life (and I did a helluva lot of hill-walking in Scotland when I was a youth in the most horrendous weather imaginable, so that is saying something :-)
It was then that the big mistake was made. Instead of sitting the car in Parc Ferme overnight and having another crack in the morning at trying to diagnose the problem, we decided to withdraw - since the boys had "convinced" me that we would not be able to fix it. If we had stuck it in Parc Ferme we could at least have tried to get back out to do the Sunday stages so that some mileage could have been recovered rather than managing only 3 stages.
Saturday 1st December
Since we had missed getting the car into Parc Ferme there was nothing to be done but have some spectating fun.
We decided we would start by watching in Halfway, so found a corner, and started watching cars waiting for our friends Fin and Neil to appear in the BMW. When they did not appear at the expected point in the field - we got a bit worried - but then on the horizon (you could see the stage for a couple of km before the corner we were on) we saw what looked like their car driving with the hazards. Eventually they reached the hairpin we were standing at - and it was at that corner that Fin decided the game was up so pulled off into the junction and stopped; with his car splashing oil over the road beneath the engine. What a co-incidence, since Fin said the first face he saw on opening the car door was me :-)
We spent a happy 30mins organising the moving of the huge boulders blocking the junction; and shuffling some cars; and eventually managed to get Fin out - and with the help of a Land Rover up a particularly steep hill - managed to tow Fin out to meet his service crew. So he at least managed to get the car sorted and back out for the Sunday stages - where a different oil problem meant the car losing all its oil again. Hard luck all round really.
Postscript
The most annoying thing! After not looking at the car for a couple of weeks after I got back; a friend, Dave Ashford of Brunswick Automotive, was helping me by trying to diagnose the fault. He noticed that one of the main ECU connectors under the bonnet felt a bit "spongey". It turns out that whoever last had that major connector apart (not me!) had managed to slightly twist the rubber seal such that it was acting as a spring. I do not know how many miles the car had done since that connector was last broken and joined (a lot) but obviously the bumps and jumps of Rally GB were enough for it to push the connectors that fraction of a mm further apart that the ECU decided to shut down some functionality. Dave pulled the rubber grommet out, pushed the connector back together, and the car fired up first time. One of those things. If we had taken apart every connector, rather than just looking and pulling at them, then we might only have lost a few minutes on the stage rather than losing the whole rest of the event. Rallying can be such a cruel sport at times. Ho hum!
A positive note from all the doom and gloom is that a friend was out spectating on the Friday morning when I was still running... and he was watching on a fast downhill section where there was a big crest before a slow-ish corner. He said 50% of the field were being wusses and braking before the crest. I was one of the 50% that was keeping it lit until I was over the crest and then braking late for the corner. So that at least cheered me up. I did something right at one point on one stage :-)