CCRMIT

2003 DNF Rally

VRC Rnd 1

22nd February 2003

Morwell

It's always the rallies where things go wrong that make for really interesting reading, but they also tend to be the hardest to write about. This is usually because it take a couple of days to pick up all the pieces.

The Never Say Dai rally Team contested the David Nutter Ford Rally, the first round of the RACEtech Steel Victorian Rally Championship, in daylight on Feb 22nd, 2003.

In the off season the car had basically undergone a full rebuild from the ground up, in order to ensure it will be strong and reliable for the huge challenge of season 2003. At this stage we look to be contesting both VCRS and VRC, but we'll keep you posted on that.

By some cruel trick of nature, the big dry broke a couple of days before the DNF Rally leaving some of the roads very slippery. Not anticipating this we had only good second hand tyres, with about half tread, making some of the stages a little tricky. Thankfully, speaking to most of the other class competitors on
the day, they were in the same boat, and so not one of us was at a particular disadvantage.

Stage one was a fun short blast around the Morwell Motorsport Complex. Unfortunately this stage saw me made the most basic of driver errors, starting to slow after passing the first flag board. In our usual events with A-B timing there is only one flag board, but on A-A events there are two, the timing marker being the second one. Ooops! This little mistake only cost us a couple of seconds.

We blew out the cobwebs of the Christmas break with a huge slide on stage two into a soft bank, without much damage. Stages three, four and five were all very slippery, and we had a spin in each of them. At one point we entered an intersection in reverse before grabbing 1st and exiting it in the more conventional way.

After second service we reached some drier roads, and were able to really push our little machine, keeping it flat for some sections of the wide open stages. We had a scary moment just before service three when the throttle stuck open, but we made it back to our crew to rectify the problem before entering into the last hand full of stages.

Local support was great for the event, with families sitting out the front of their houses watching the rally cars go by, even just on transport stages where we are travelling at normal road speeds.

In the last but one stage we cracked the exhaust which saw us lose power. Approaching the final stage it broke completely. We paused at final service but because of where it had snapped there was nothing we could do for it. At SS13 start control some people started kicking up stink, but the officials let us start the stage regardless, so we limped our way around the hill climb, popping and banging for a finish in our first VRC event. We ended up third in class.

My parents, who came up to spectate, had a little incident of their own on the road from one of the spectator points heavily damaging the front of the Jaguar. This meant we had to tow the Jag home and leave the rally car at a friends place about 10 mins away. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as we had another misadventure on the way home, leaving the Rangie on it's side in a ditch, the trailer very bent and some fresh damage on the Jag. I can't help but thinking.... what if the rally car was in tow at the time - repairs would have been very tight to be ready for the TCV in only a couple of weeks time. There were no injuries in the accident.

Thank you very much to everyone who helped us out on the night, and to Bernie, Chris, Ross, Patrina, Robyn, Ashley, Terry, Graeme and all the officials who stood out in the cold and the wet all day, big thank you for a great event.