Bomb Along Stages 8th September 2002

We were pretty confident about this event as we had been to the venue before and had done quite well.  We had repaired and tested the car after the damage from Keevil.

Only we were wrong to be confident at all.

 We left Saturday lunchtime to get to the venue at about 3pm, after several miles of traffic on the M11 we arrived at Oakington ready for Noise and Scruitineering. 

Noise opened at 5.30pm and we were one of the first in the queue. one by one all the cars were failing the noise test by being over 98db, i wasn't too worried as we had passed noise at Keevil at 98db on the nose.  So it was then our turn, a reading of 101db was given. what the ..... I said.  Pretty soon there was a lot of cars that had failed and some pressure was put on the Noise scruitineer that his very recently calibrated meter was not too accurate.

The Clerk of the Course decided it must be over reading by 4db so most people were given the pass.

So onto scruitineering and as usual the car passed without problems.

We had to wait for Darren my co-driver to get to the venue and then we signed on and got the maps and time cards.  Once we had done that we traveled the few miles to the Posthouse for a meal and some sleep.  My alarm went off at 5.30am  and we were back at Oakington in just over an hour.

A quick check over the car and a cup of tea and we were ready for our start at 9.19am.

Stage one started well up until I selected 3rd gear and our problems began.  The car didn't have much power and wouldn't got faster than 70mph.  Now that's not good at a venue where some cars are topping 130mph and we should have been up to 110mph+.  We also had a slight detour on the Runway but we wont talk to much about that.  Over all we lost over 2 minutes on that stage and I was not happy at all.

During service the carb's were re balanced and hopefully the problem would be sorted.

Stage 2 wasn't any better nor was stage 3 and 4.  We couldn't work out what was causing this problem on the fast bits but not showing itself on the slow tight bits around the buildings.

After stage 4 I upped the fuel pressure regulator to 3psi, it started to have an effect on stage 5 and the car ran better for longer but it still wasn't right.  With our new found speed I was following an Alfasud but on the long straights we still had a problem with fuel starvation.  I worked out that in the tight slower bits the carb's were getting enough fuel to them to work fine, but on the longer straights the fuel pressure regulator wasn't allowing enough fuel through to correctly fuel the engine.  I decided that for stage 6 I was going to open it up to 4psi.  The problem was we didn't get as far as stage 6, we didn't even get to the end of stage 5.  On a tight right hand corner a lorry tyre had been clipped out onto the race line I was taking and with being so close to the Alfasud I didn't see it until the last second.  The right hand wheel ran straight over it and propelled my side of the car into the air, I remember thinking to myself "its ok it will land on the wheels again" but it didn't come back down.  the car rolled onto its roof and stopped.

Its not a nice feeling being suspended upside down in a car and even worse when your door doesn't open.  Luckily the co drivers door did so we both crawled out of the car.

So with that our rallying year of 2002 finished with a bang and we will begin the build of a new car very soon.

Many thanks to my family who have given their support to the team and also for their continued support during the build of the new car.