In his latest exclusive column for Crash.net, young up-and-coming British rallying star Matt Beebe reflects on a giant-killing performance on the Jim Clark Rally that has hoisted the 25-year-old back up into contention for British Rally Championship Class R2 honours…
We had struck a late deal with Total Motorsport to use a brand new Citroen C2R2 this year – a real proper rally car – but shortly after the first round the company went bust so it all fell through. That was a disappointment because it would have been a good step forward for me.
We had put our old MG ZR 160 up for sale, but luckily we still hadn’t sold it so we were able to revert back to it for the
Jim Clark. That’s what I’ve got all my experience in and what I know, plus it’s a lot easier to drive than the Citroen was. We knew we could get some good results with it, and we managed to get a bit of testing in before the event and found a good set-up so we went up to Scotland aiming to get a strong finish.
I’ve done the Jim Clark before in that car and had two wins in two years, so I was confident we could set some good times. I knew we didn’t have the ultimate pace of cars like the Citroens or Honda Civic – which have more power and top speed – so we had to push as hard as we could, get to the end of the rally and just hope other people made mistakes or had problems along the way.
We pushed hard on the first evening and were behind only George Thomas and Vesa Mikkola, so we were really pleased with those opening two stages. We started again the following morning and pushed really hard through the first loop battling with George, then Vesa had a puncture on the second stage which dropped him to the back.
After that there was a little bit of rain and I went very cautiously, allowing George to take 23 seconds off us on one stage alone. I was a bit disappointed all the hard work we had put in over the first few stages had gone to pot just like that, so at service we regrouped and went out to really attack the following set of stages so as not to lose any more time.
