Going into that stage, I hadn’t actually seen the most up-to-date leaderboard, and I thought we were still behind Vesa Mikkola in the Honda and George Thomas in the Citroën. As it was George had already retired with mechanical failure and Vesa had put it off the road, so in reality we were leading. We weren’t chasing the cars in front of us; we were happy in third and had gone into the stage aiming just to get through it, get to the end again and score some more good points, but as in Ulster the luck just wasn’t with us. We must have gone over 10,000 rocks on that event which looked exactly the same as that one, but this time it struck the car in the wrong place and put us out of the rally.
It was massively frustrating again when we had been heading for a good result; I was really happy with how I was driving and how Gareth was reading the notes. To have a mechanical failure when you’re on course for a good result is always a big disappointment, but we could take some bonuses away from the times we had been setting.
We were hoping to possibly upgrade to another car for Wales Rally GB, albeit within the same class, but unfortunately with the engine problem in Ulster and the gearbox problem on the Trackrod any budget we had to buy another car has been eaten up. That means we’ll be going to Wales with the MG again, but we feel confident we can set some good times. We know we’ve got the speed to get a good result; we just need a little bit of luck and a bit of reliability.
In a way we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, though. We’ve got to make it to the end of the event to get the points and think about the championship, but at the same time it’s Wales Rally GB and as such the biggest shop window in the country. If we can go there and set some cracking stage times, you never know who’s watching. That’s the only way you’re going to progress, by really impressing the right sort of people in the right environment.
