In the fifth of an exclusive series of columns for Crash.net, former British rally champion David Higgins talks about ripped muscles, Guy Wilks' exclusion from the Trackrod, and his championship showdown with his brother.



As I write this column I'm finding leaning over the laptop quite painful - it's hard to believe I contested Trackrod Rally Yorkshire in worse pain just a few weeks ago.
The problem started when I was instructing at our Forest Experience Rally School the week before the rally. Someone rolled a car when I was sitting alongside them as a passenger, and I hurt myself as we rolled.

Initially I thought I had broken some ribs, but now we think the problem is actually that the muscle that holds the ribs together has torn away. Either way, it's phenomenally painful and I was unable to take any painkillers during the rally because they were making me sick.

But the last time I wrote I was only just preparing for the Ulster Rally, so we'll go back to that...

We had been disappointed with our speed on Rally Isle of Man [even though we finished third], so we practically re-built the cars for the Ulster. We finished fifth in Ireland in the end though and that really wasn't good enough.

The cars ran faultlessly, but we thought we had made a lot of progress on the cars ahead of the event, and we found we had gone backwards instead.

But nobody ever said developing a new car would be easy, so we took on board what we had learned and moved on. The important thing was we still led the championship after Ulster.

But we hadn't much time to think about the BRC before we had to pack up for the next event in China, the Mohe Rally. Sometimes the British and Chinese events fall quite close to each other on the calendar, especially this year, when the championship in China has started later in the year because of the Olympics.

The Mohe Rally was an unusual one for China. It actually got stopped early because of the high speeds we were reaching on the stages. The stages are usually twisty in China so we don't reach average speeds of 100mph and the fact we were all going so fast surprised the organisers.