British junior rally driver Tom Cave will scrap his revision notes next weekend and pick up his pace notes once again, as he returns to rallying after the end of his GCSE exams.
The 16 year-old, who elected to miss a round of the Latvian Rally Championship to concentrate on his studies, has now completed his exams and has entered the Rally Kekava 2008 to get his rally programme back on track.
Next weekend's rally is a round of the Latvian RallySprint championship but Cave will be using the event to reacquaint himself with the Latvian stages, after an absence of six weeks. His last event, the Talsi Rally, ended with a low-speed roll on the sixth stage and subsequent retirement, so the teenager will be keen to get as many miles under his belt as possible to build confidence ready for the following weekend's National event.
“It's great to have finished my exams at last,” he said. “It feels like it's been a long time coming, with the exams themselves and the preceding revision but I feel good to have completed them. Now I can focus on my rallying and get back out on the stages.”
The Ford Fiesta ST rally car which Cave uses in the National championship is still being repaired after the roll on the Talsi Rally, so he will revert to the car he used last year in Latvia, an MG ZR, for this event.
“It's a little annoying to be doing the event in the ZR as obviously, I'd prefer to be doing it in the Fiesta,” he said. “However, the goal for this event is to get a decent result and get another finish under our belt, to count towards my international license. So in that sense, the older MG, while not handling as well as the Fiesta, should be fine for the job.”
Cave plans to contest the UK's round of the
FIA World Rally Championship, Wales Rally GB, in December this year, just days after his 17th birthday. As he will potentially only just have passed his test, he will run with a Latvian International license and to gain that, finishing the next few rallies and gaining as much experiences as possible is crucial.
![Tom Cave in action on the 2008 Rally Kekava. [Pic credit: Arturs Tinte, www.lifemirror.lv]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/436708.jpg)
