A giant-killing performance from reigning British Rally Championship (BRC) Class R3 title-holder and Crash.net columnist Matt Beebe on the Manx International Rally has seen the 25-year-old take control of proceedings once again this year as the season hits its halfway stage. Here he tells us how he did it…
In the run-up to the Manx International Rally we took part in the Rally of the Midlands again, which was effectively my home event. It’s based in Nuneaton and Hinckley and I live in Nuneaton, so you can’t get much more local than that. We used that as a test after the
Jim Clark, just to try and get a bit more speed out of the car before the Isle of Man.
We were quite fortunate – we had a bit of rain that weekend and it usually rains on the Manx International – so it was good practice before we go over there for the next round of the BRC. We were actually expecting rain on all three days of the Rally of the Midlands so the tyres we had were very soft, but as it was we had bright sunshine all throughout the first day. That made the tyres too soft, and round MIRA it’s quite abrasive which cooked the rubber, but we still managed to set some good times even though the tyres were going off towards the end of the stages.
The weather did make things really tricky – you’ve got different types of tarmac on the event which all have different levels of grip in the rain, so you go round corners that are all the same on your pace notes, but which have different grip from one to the next. It was very unpredictable and difficult to get a lot of confidence.
My co-driver for the event, Gary Newton, is one of the lecturers from North Warwickshire and Hinckley College. He’s been helping out working on the car for two years, and we’ve been saying since then we were going to do a rally together so it was about time we did it. We both knew that event, so we thought it was a good opportunity. Gaz did really well and made no mistakes all weekend. We finished sixth overall and second two wheel-drive home, so that was a really good result and we were well-chuffed.
