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.
We set some good times the following morning and were matching George Thomas in the Citroën before he went out, so it was a good comeback after the problem and we managed to get up to third in class. When George crashed that put us second, just behind Andreas in his Fiesta. We then pushed really hard to try and catch him, but though we could match him sometimes we couldn’t actually close the gap. That left us second at the end of day two, about 30 seconds behind Andreas and two minutes ahead of Lorna Smith, the next in class.
We were happy to settle for that, not take any risks day three and just concentrate on the championship, but of course in rallying it’s never all plain sailing and on the final day with just five miles to go on the first stage the driveshaft popped out of the gearbox. That cost us nearly a minute-and-a-half of our two-minute lead over Lorna and meant we had to push for the whole day.
Without the various problems we may have been able to be those couple of seconds quicker everywhere and get in front of Andreas. As it was we didn’t, but we were more than happy with second place. To finish ahead of all the other championship guys was a great result considering all the dramas.
The Ulster Rally is up next, and we’ve got a bit of a point to prove in Ireland. I’ve only ever competed there once before and I crashed on the first stage, so I’m going to go there, not be scared by the place and really push for another good result.
