sorry for the delayed reply but ive just finished 4 weekends in a row of motorsport in 3 different cars so its taken a bit to catch up on things!
Well the alpine 09 will go down as the toughest rally of my life so far.. the lead up went fairly smooth compared to 07 but not without massive thanks to my good mate Nev who did a huge amount of car prep/running around work for me as i was in another state. With Molly comfirming she couldnt get a flight back to Aus in time for the event (with only a few days to the rally!) and good mate Dale flying back to aus early, he was happy to jump into the nav's seat for a few fun days in the datto. after all, it was an "upgrade" the the citroen WORLD RALLY CAR that he had been co driving in all year
day one and we set a safe pace that netted us 5th on the first stage, with dale commenting "are you going to have a go on the next one!?" so we had a go and very nearly stuck it into the trees on his side! haha.. But just after the speccy point i managed to break the accelerator pedal off the floor, so for the remainder of the 6km stage i was using hand throttle to drive, with dale doing the gears and helping to steer at times! so that messed our seeding up and was up to the coc to allocate our seeding based on first stage and previous results. To add drama we were reported for wheelspin, none of that did i do (the car is almost stalled off the line!), so off i went with my incar to show that the wheelspin claim was false. With that cleared all good ("but this is your first warning and next time u do it its 20mins!") hanging over the our heads for the rally we got into sat morning.
Saturday started off well and we got into a decent rythmn until the start of ss6 i think where the datto decided it didnt want to start before the stage, so dale and i got to work on it and found lack of fuel pressure, eventually managed to get it running we started the stage but loss powed mid way through and had to keep flicking the switch from spare pump to main to keep it mobile. Next was service and still couldnt rectify the problem and after dropping about 20 road positions we found the toggle switch was loosing contact intermittantly! so hard wired that and off to next stages. Crusing through them we got struck in 16km's of Swill's dust after he stuck it off.. next stage the the alt light started flashing and the heat shield broke of extractors. So fixed all those dramas in service and headed for the night stuff.
Went a bit soft in first 5 km's of so of the tarmac havig never done this stage propperly before took a bit to get in the swing of things. All the other night stages went well apart from the dust, which i think everyone except car 1 got.
So here comes sunday, and hoping for a trouble free day as my mighty datto has never let me down soo many times before! Set some good times in the morning and as we were close to the guys ahead decided that we needed to have a big CRACK in the 40km stage. And that we did, up until the right hairpin where mick was filming, when i pulled the handbrake it went straight up which meant we had no rear brakes.. Lost fluid. So drove rest of stage very cautiously and got back to service where the boys could do their best to fix the broken caliper. With 3 stages to go and so much time lost it was just a matter of making the finish and 3 km's into the next stage a massive off in 4th gear rang alarm bells in my head to back it off and get to the finish so thats what we did. I jinked us by commenting at the start of final stage "what else could go wrong!" and with 6km's go the datto dropped a cylinder on the fast shire road so we limped it to the finish. (i think the servo guy who said his fuel was 98 was incorrect as its melted a piston and nothing has changed in the car since it was built in 07)
So we finished and were 4th on provisional results which was amazing considering the dramas we had, but then the road penalites came through and dropped us down the order. But all in all, not too bad i spose.
MASSIVE thanks to my crew who worked their absolute butts off all weekend to keep us running. Nev, Brendo, Austie, Daz and Vic.. couldnt of done it without ya!
And to the sponsors for getting us there, Rallyschool.com.au, Racecam incar camera's, Autosport SA, VELO seats, Datosport, ELF lubricants, Grand Auto Wreckers, Pfitzner Performance gearboxes thanks for all your generous help!
) :
) and those helping to keep us going during the weekend.
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