The opening rounds of the season are now done and dusted and we are looking forward to Rockingham, but before the BTCC campaign kicked off, I took the chance to try something a bit different.
I’ve got a really nice Mk II RS2000 Escort rally car, so I did the first round of this years British Historic Rally Championship which was the Robin Hood Historic Forest Stages. As the name suggests, it’s held in Sherwood Forest.
It was really good although I was ever so slow! The car performed really well and we managed to finish sixth in class which was good. I’ve tried to do the event a few times before with the Escort I had previously, which was all-signing and all-dancing and should really have been winning the event outright. The car kept breaking, so I sold it last year and took this one in part exchange; it’s just a little simple car but it ran perfectly throughout the event.
I’ve only done a little bit of rallying, although when I was younger I wanted to do quite a lot of it – I just couldn’t afford it. About four years ago, I hired an old Mk I Escort to do that event and I really enjoyed it. I then bought a car that was a bit too quick for me and in the first rally I did on Epynt I comprehensively destroyed it – which wasn’t a good thing to do!
A lot of people told me it was a classic case of 'racing driver goes rallying' as on the first day, I was moderately ok and on the second day I was really quick. On the two stages before I went off, I had been quickest and that should maybe have told me that I was too close to the mark. That car didn’t survive to the next day so I built another Mk I but made the mistake of building it too well. I built it like one of our touring cars and everything on it was just perfect and the first time I took it out to the woods, I couldn’t get over how much the car owed me and I was scared about putting a mark on it.
