A Most Peculiar Rally!

We'd competed on the Tour of Cornwall Rally a couple of times before and decided to have another go this year. All the preparations went well and I was looking forward to teaming up with Lesley Higginbotham again following the birth of her baby girl.

The Tour of Cornwall is a 2 day event over the last weekend in April and, as it takes a long time to get there, we planned on leaving late on the Friday morning to get there in time for scrutineering in the evening. The first inkling we had that things were not going to go as planned that weekend came with the news on the Friday morning that the M6 was closed due to bomb scares. This was the way that Lesley would be coming to Cornwall ! They left at 10 am and eventually arrived in Cornwall at 7 p.m. after following a roundabout route on country lanes in Wales.

We had a good journey down but the service barge had all sorts of problems as the carburettor kept freezing and, even before they set out, they had to do a quick alternator change. Our barge wasn't the only one with problems. There was another crew staying at our hotel and their barge was due to arrive in the evening but they didn't make it until 2 am. They were stopped by the police who wanted to know why 3 guys were driving around in a van carrying lots of tools and a lot of petrol! The rally car was already in Cornwall so it took them a long time to persuade the police that they were actually on their way to a rally and weren't about to blow up the M5.

We were due to compete in the Renault Clio for this event and we got through scrutineering despite an indicator lightbulb refusing to play ball. This was just the calm before the storm!

We set off from Newquay to the start in Truro and the internal blower gave up the ghost. We then had to wait in a queue to go over the start ramp and the car started seriously misting up. It also started overheating and I could hardly see to drive over the start ramp as there was so much steam coming out. We just about made it to the first road section and had the fan permanently wired on. For some reason, this has often been required on the Clio and sometimes on the Metro as well.

The first day was fairly uneventful: the weather was very changeable and tyre choice was a real lottery. Whatever you chose, you were bound to be wrong some of the time. On the Portreath stage, we had the wrong rear tyres, spun 3 times, very nearly rolled and narrowly missed an electricity sub-station! Apart from that, the windscreen wipers packed up in the pouring rain, we nearly ran out of petrol, the petrol cap went walkies, 2 wheel nuts went on the nearside front, we lost a wheel insert and then found it again, the front brakes were playing up and had to be bled, we flat spotted a tyre, there was a problem with the front suspension and, last but certainly not least, the gear knob fell off in the middle of a stage!

On the way back to Newquay for the final stage of the night, a speckie special around the Hendra holiday camp, the steering started playing up and we could hardly steer around left hand corners. We weren't too worried as the speckie special was short and we had some service time before Parc Ferme. There were 6 of us in the crew: Lesley and I in the rally car, with Graham, Paul and Nick in the Vauxhall Crapalier chase car ( due to the problems we'd been having and the shortage of service time, we had to do quite a few running repairs in road time plus having to change tyres before every stage practically, so we needed 3 people in the chase car). This left Sandy to drive the service barge from the central service area back to Rally HQ in Newquay. Sandy comes from Newquay, knows the area really well and was staying at his parents place in Newquay.

We did the speckie special as best we could and then went to the service area. No barge! We waited and waited. The radios had decided that they didn't want to play most of the weekend so we couldn't contact Sandy. In the end, we had to go into Parc Ferme with no service on the car. By this time we were getting worried about Sandy. We talked to other crews and they had seen him leaving the central service area and heading off towards Newquay. Paul, Nick and Graham headed off on their own Tour of Cornwall to see if they could see any trace of Sandy and the barge but to no avail. We phoned the police at 8 p.m. to see if they had had any report of an accident, but they hadn't and we phoned again at 10.30 p.m. and still nothing.

We went to Sandy's parents' place but they hadn't seen him or heard from him. We went to bed that night really worried as to what on earth could have happened. Nick was also worried as all his tools were in the barge! The following morning, we got the car out of Parc Ferme and Graham went off to try to find out what had happened. Luckily, our steering problem was only minor and we used someone else's barge before they disappeared off home as their car was out of the event. Lesley meanwhile had eaten something that violently disagreed with her and very nearly suffered from mal de nav just on the way to Parc Ferme in the chase car. It was touch and go as to whether she would be able to start the day at all! However, she managed to get into the car without being ill and we set off for the first stage with only a chase car with 1 jerry of petrol, 2 tyres and a few tools.

A mile or so into the first stage, the next disaster struck - the gear linkage went. We had no reverse gear and all the others were just swimming around. At this stage, we very nearly gave up. It is so embarrassing when you are coming into a chicane and you can see the looks on people's faces as you are desperately trying to find any gear from the rice pudding - stupid driver's missed a gear! The second time around, their expression changes: maybe there is a problem with this car. The third time: there is definitely a problem!

In the meantime, Graham had finally got some news to report. He'd contacted Sandy's parents again and they reported to him that Sandy had had an accident and had been in hospital in Truro overnight. When Graham phoned the police and asked why he hadn't been told about the accident they said that it had been an oversight and that the accident had been reported to them before 8 o'clock the previous night. What happened was that Sandy had had an epileptic fit, had driven off in totally the opposite direction and had ended up ram-raiding the service barge into the window of a toy shop in Falmouth. Sandy was unhurt thankfully but the barge was a right-off. We "borrowed" a service plate from a crew who had retired, so now we had a Cavalier chase car and a Cavalier barge, both with very little in them, nursing a sick Rally car.

The top priority was tyres as the Cornish airfields eat tyres. Graham drove ahead to the service area to get 2 new slicks on the only spare pair of rims whilst we were competing on the stage. Fortunately, the weather was now dry so we only needed to worry about dry tyres.