After that we finished second in class on the Isle of Man to Andreas Sjolander, but we treated that like a victory because we beat all the other cars we’re competing against in the championship and that enabled us to pull out a lead in the title chase.
Richard Mills was my co-driver for the weekend. We had only ever sat together once before, and that was on the
Jim Clark during my Stars of the Future campaign in 2005. We won the class there and were hoping to get another good result this time, and we worked really well together. I think Richard was quite surprised at the difference between how much quicker the 1.8-litre MG was from the 1.4-litre one we had before. He soon got used to it though.
The car felt good on the first stage – a short blast around Castletown – then the second stage was the first proper one of the rally through the twisty lanes. The Isle of Man is notoriously bumpy and the car was bouncing around a lot at the back which made things quite hectic. I made a big mistake and missed a gearchange and over-revved the engine. After the event we found out we’d actually bent six inlet valves, so it could have signalled the end of our rally. That left the engine a little bit down on power but it was still running, which was the main thing.
At the end of the first day we had to choose between packing up and heading home or carrying on and risk blowing the engine up. It was my dad’s decision that we hadn’t gone all the way to the Isle of Man to give up on a ‘maybe’ so we carried on, but we knew if we did that we needed to get a good result and that gave us an extra impetus to push really hard in the morning.
We were down on power low down in the revs, but higher up the car seemed alright. We must have been losing quite a bit on acceleration, but we were only a couple of seconds behind Andreas here and there.
