Formula One correspondent Jonathan McEvoy has successfully completed his rally co-driving apprenticeship as he shapes up for next month's Wales Rally GB, with his highest finish yet on last weekend's Kall Kwik Rally – despite getting in a muddle over his pace notes.

Only his fourth-ever event, rally new boy McEvoy accompanied TV pundit Tony Jardine to an impressive sixth place outright over 45 miles around Scarborough and York. Fast forest stages tested the pair on their final training event before their ultimate challenge, but it was an encouraging dress rehearsal for the Daily Mail scribe, even if he is aware the daunting Welsh forests will be another proposition altogether.

The rally began well for the Sportinglife.com squad as good weather ensured the North Yorkshire forests remained dry in the early stages. However, Jardine and McEvoy had a slow start, as the latter battled with the pace notes they had written the previous day on the recce, this being the first time he had been given the added challenge of putting together his own notes for the course.

“On the first stage I was getting ahead in the delivery of my pace notes which I think annoyed and confused Tony,” he explained afterwards, “but I managed to redeem myself and was more in sync with the notes on stage two, which was definitely our quickest of the morning. The stages were mainly gravel and extremely fast – it must have helped that the weather held out for us at the start of the day.”

Navigating troubles continued on the final stage as McEvoy confused stage seven notes for stage eight. Having suddenly realised his calls were not matching the route, it took him a minute to re-group and find the right page.

“Tony was clearly ignoring me on the last stage,” he admitted, “and I was horrified when it slowly dawned on me that I had turned over too many pages of the stage notes! It took me at least a minute to find my correct place, and this caused hazards for us as we were slipping and sliding our way through the forest with little direction from myself.”

Fortunately the media duo made it through the final stage in one piece, with their Castol-backed Ford Fiesta once again performing faultlessly from beginning to end.

“That was our last rehearsal before the big one and it's better to iron out problems now on a national event than to have confusion on Wales Rally GB,” added Jardine, congratulating his navigator on another fine result. “Because it's the first time Jon has written notes some of them became jumbled and it's all in the method of setting them out on the page.

“At one point we arrived at a slow bend, flat-out at over 100 mph after Jon inadvertently called the note too slowly. If he had read the instruction all together I would have slowed in time. As it was we had a huge scary moment, but we have to remember Jon is only on his fourth rally and he is doing a brilliant job. The stages were super fast – a superb training event for our man from the Daily Mail.”