Weekend Success- Class Win in Wales and 1st Overall in Derbyshire

Post date: Apr 5, 2011 8:14:34 AM

The weekend of the 2nd/3rd April was a busy one, with 2 rallies in less than 24 hours! On Friday afternoon, Mark and Sasha made the 130 mile trip to Welshpool for the first round of the BRCC, the Bulldog Rally. It was an early start on Saturday morning and after 6 stages, they were in 12th place overall and 1st in class.

They departed Welshpool at around 4:30pm and arrived back in Derbyshire at around 7pm where Mark made his arrangements to marshal and Sasha got prepared for a full night rally with Guy Robinson in his road rally spec Subaru on the Matlock Motor Club VK Rally.

Despite a navigational error on the second section which lost the crew over 3 minutes, they managed to take the overall win by 1m 20s.

Mark will be out with Sasha next on the Pirelli Rally and she will join Guy next on another local Derbysire event in July - the Drystone.

My ramblings on the BRF:

What a fab night! Congratulations to Steve and the organising team for putting on first rate Derbyshire event. The route was excellent, a good selection of smooth whites (for Derbyshire!), the navigation was just right, the marshals were all clued up and the special tests at chez Perez were fantastic.

As for me, well what an experience. I am not sure what I felt at the start…tired, nervous, apprehensive, stressed, a combination of all the above. Either way I got myself organised, installed myself in the silly seat and away we went!

And on the 2nd section we certainly went…3 minutes in the wrong direction.

Lack of concentration, and/or brain removed, I took us the wrong way and we pulled in at the third control behind car 4. On the plus side (?), we were not running first car on the road any more...

Gutted and extremely annoyed with myself for a stupid and timely error, I decided there and then that I had blown my best chance of my first win. Guy stayed very calm despite what had just happened and we decided that we would carry on, get on with the job and try to pull back what time we (I) had lost. I am sure Guy was wondering at this point what he had let him self in for…

For the rest of the first half, we knew we were pulling time back from the crews in front, but had no idea whether it would be enough by the end of the event to make it count. At half way we found out that we were over 2 minutes down on the leader which put us into 7th (in fact at the finish we discovered that we were actually 4th at half way – a mistype on the computer, but we didn’t know this at the time). We talked about a top 5 placing.

The second half went smoothly. We stayed in pole position on the road and at the end of the last special test I thanked Guy for an absolutely fantastic ride round the Derbyshire lanes, again apologising for my costly mistake.

At the finish I was surprised, amazed, happy…we had done enough over the rest of the event to win the rally. I think it still hasn’t sunk in!

On hindsight, my error probably snapped me out of whatever feelings were going through me at the start which took the pressure off so I could do my job properly. Although my distances on the map had a lot to be desired (what are these measurement units called miles?!) Guy quickly ‘adapted’ to my calls and we didn’t make any more mistakes all night other than a slight overshoot of a board.

A massive well done and thank you to Guy who kept his cool throughout, even though I opted to make it a bit more challenging for him from the start!

Commiserations to those who didn’t make it to the finish.

Especially Sam and Jason who by all accounts were going extremely well up to the point the car gave in. Well done to all the award winners, everyone that finished and again to Steve who put on a superb event yet again. Thanks also to Mr Perez who gave us the use of his back garden.

Finally a big thank you has to go to the marshals

that did a superb job all night. We can’t run these events without you!

For me, this has been a fab weekend. To take a class win with Mark on the Bulldog BRCC and 12th o/a, and to have my first overall win on my local road rally has been amazing!

It has all been a huge learning experience for me and I have a lot to take away with me for the next rally…I can’t wait!