McLachlan Rallying

Danum Road Rally 1997

Linholme MC - 4th October

Result - 1st Overall

Having all but given up on making an impression on any championships, we decided to pick and choose events just for fun! The first one to fit the bill was the Danum Trophy rally on 4th October, which is an Eastern Counties Championship event, but not one usually frequented by Southern Competitors due to its starting location in Barnsley.

However, being from the area, I’d already done the event twice before, and found it to be competitive and well organised. A 2nd place finish in‘96 helped to seed us as car 3. As my parents live in Sheffield, I arranged to stop there and have some food. This was fortunate because when I arrived at 4:00pm on the Saturday, the rear of the car was covered in oil.

Investigation showed a cracked gearbox extension housing, and no oil in the gearbox. We decided to have a desperate attempt to fix it before the rally. About the last scrap yard in the yellow pages turned out to have a Sierra box in stock, and we arrived five minutes before they closed (5:00 pm). The gearbox looked very dubious, being coated in thick sludge, and having the lever hole full of glass!, but at £25 we had nothing to lose, especially as we had to do something to get the car running so that I could get home the following day.

At our due time at noise check, we were lining up the ‘new’ gearbox. At our due time at scrutineering, we were re-attaching all the gearbox ancillaries. 40 minutes before our due start time we turned up at the scrutineering venue still smeared with gearbox oil. After finding the noise tester and getting through scrutineering, we barely had time to do the (fortunately) short pre-event plotting before the off.

The first half of the event was tight, and a mistake on the first section nearly cost us dear. Immediately after catching up with car 2, he pulled over, and I assumed he was letting me past. But nearing the end of the section it became obvious that there was a codeboard missing from our (all codeboards listed) timesheet. We did a large loop back to join the route again near the start of the section. Sure enough, the codeboard was where car 2 had pulled over. The rest of the first half followed in the same vein with tight mostly tarmac sections. We missed another codeboard on a slip road (like the Poxihen), but again noticed in time to go back for it before the next TC.
At the half waypoint, we were fail free but with several minutes lateness. Other crews seemed to be doing better. The second half started off competitively but nearer the end became more navigational to compensate for the straighter, more open roads on map 106. The front running crews however were managing to clean the sections easily. Confident that our second half had been good (penalty free I think), we were optimistic about the result, but extremely pleased to come first by 2 minutes, making the frantic gearbox change all worthwhile.

ANCC championship leaders (car 2) thought that they had the event in the bag, knowing that we had missed the first codeboard, but there could be no arguing that we’d picked up far more lateness than anyone else on the first section while rectifying the mistake.

Crystal glasses were the reward, which makes a change from the usual plastic trophies that get banished from the house!