East Anglian Adventure
Steady Progress Made Through the Day - 10th Overall
Chelmsford Motor Club EACS Endurance - 28th March 2009
Round 2 then, and with the gear linkage firmly bolted down, the engine mount welded back together, and the other engine mount welded up for good measure! we set off in good spirit for the EACS.
The event was a one day affair using airfields, military camps, farm tracks, and a bit of night-time forestry as well. We'd at least seen Woodbridge airfield before when helping out at last years Woodbridge stages, so thought we'd get off to a good start. Unfortunately it wasn't to be, the surface was very greasy (excuse 1) and it was my first time with the car on tarmac (excuse 2), and on the second selectif I spun the car through some budleia bushes taking out a rear tyre - down to 32nd straight away. The third selectif was even worse, with us missing a set of cones and getting a wrong test - now 38th. Bad start.
Not to be disuaded however, we picked ourselves up and started trying to recover. The next test, again on Woodbridge saw us 14th fastest, then 7th fastest at a brilliant military camp. We were really enjoying it by now, and as the day progressed I found myself laughing on the Selectifs! A good sausage sandwich lunch helped at lunchtime as well. By now I'd acclimatised and we were consistently around 5th fastest (apart from when we slide past cones and had to sort ourselves out). We started to enjoy the Woodbridge sections despite some wing damage on the budleia again..., and by the tea halt had climbed the leaderboard to 11th overall.
The evening went well, the forest sections were a bit muddy, and started to cut up quite badly, but were good fun non-the-less. Unfortunately two had to be cancelled due to travellers moving in! There were a couple of road rally sections, which we REALLY enjoyed, but these were timed very lazily and any gains that could have been made here didn't materialise as we waiting for our minute at the controls. I do like the road rally sections and hope that they feature more heavily in the forthcoming events than in the first two.
By the end of the evening section, we'd crept up to 10th overall which isn't too bad considering the problems in the early part of the day. A few more seconds certainly need to shaved off our selectif times, but we're heading in the right direction. As you can see from the pictures, we'd decided to wear helmets on this one, and this worked fine - we could actually hear each other perfectly well. Surprisingly few others had bothered, but we were pleased of them and will use them again especially where fast forestry is involved.
As we hadn't booked a room in the hotel, we had to drive back to Wales, which made it a very late finish (4:30am). Despite this we still managed to strip the car interior on Sunday ready for the rest of the roll cage to be fitted before the Great Bustard. We're really looking forward to that now!
Thanks to Andy Manston for the on event photos. http://www.mandh-photography.co.uk