We set off with some jogularity sections, which were really easy to follow, accurate, and generally without complaint. I really don't know what happened, other than we missed a slot and massively messed up costing ourselves 199 seconds - a monstrous amount when we'd been fighting for small numbers all day. This dropped us straight down to 5th - ouch!
We had no option but to really go for it and hope others made mistakes as well. Fortunately they did, and with us going full attack on all the sections (many copied over from the evening selectifs) we made it back, not to 2nd but to 1st place before the last run around Worthy Farm!
This went pretty well, we made a good time, but with a couple of minor errors. One of these was missing a junction. We realised the error, turned round went back, turned into the junction and straight into a Passage Check. No problem - except that he gave us a Wrong Approach as we'd come from the wrong direction at the junction. 300 seconds penalty. We did contest this at the end, but the organisers were having none of it, and this is a shame, as we'd clearly completed all of the route, and entered the PC in the correct direction. Pickyness like this is not good.
The result - 2nd place, and only 15 seconds away from 1st (read the last paragraph again!). Frustrated? ....very.
The event was well organised, with faultless route instructions, excellent selectifs, and near perfect ;-) marshalling. One thing that was a bit much was the use of consecutive rough woodland stages in the night section. This was to actually to our favour as we made up a lot of time, but we had been wearing helmets for safety through those same sections earlier in the evening (not possible on the road rally part) and the lack of any neutrals for tyre change etc means this part of the event is more of a gamble than it should be. Other than this I really do like the Great Bustard.
The Sportway tyres that we ran are massively improved in terms of strength from last years equivalents (now being based on van carcasses), with only a couple of punctures seen all event (amazing on this kind of surface) so this should be less of a randomizing factor this year.
We were really pleased to be on the pace all event, the engine clearly is a lot better than the one that was in the car, and we're now looking forward to a good season's competition.
Thanks to Andy Manston for the on event photos. http://www.mandh-photography.co.uk
Great Bustard Rally - 10th/11th April 2010
The Great Bustard was this year's opening round of the Endurance Road Rally Championship. Having had a go at all the rounds last year, we were hoping to do a bit better. We were usually top ten but only occasionally fast enough to be top five and this wasn't good enough!
The car had to be fairly extensively rebuilt after the Preston road rally of December 2009, so we started the Bustard with a scrapyard fresh engine with an aftermarket ECU, repaired axle mounts, new wheel bearings, and a new driveshaft (fitted a day before the event when it started leaking!). The 'new' engine seemed a lot more fresh than the last, so I was hoping to have more success.
We set off with two 30 second blasts round the cattle market at the start venue then headed over the Keevil airfield. This provided a really good start to the event with some tight bits, faster bits, and without resorting to any autotest sillyness. Third fastest was a great result here, and the 2nd fastest at the adjoining Ashton Mill pulled us into 2nd place overall - a good start! More mainly tarmac Selectifs followed, and then a visit to Worthy Farm, the next big selectif. 4th place here, followed by 3rd at Slait barn left us in 2nd place at the tea halt - a very satisfying afternoon after we'd been stuggling to get on the pace last year.
We were fastest on the 2nd Slait Barn Selectif, and we stayed in the top few over the early evening woodland sections swapping 2nd and 3rd places with Owen Turner through this part of the rally. We were fastest on both runs of the Castle Wood Selectif, taking 2nd place into the night rally section as Owen unfortunately suffered exhaust failure.
Normally the night section is my favourite part of an Endurance rally, but in this case it all started coming undone, but not just for us!
