Thought I'd share some of my experience yesterday.
A good friend of mine and work colleague Dave has for many years competed in tarmac rallying. His car at present is a full homolgated international spec Citroen C2 R2 (1600cc, Sadev box, proper suspension, brakes and all the trimmings). His usual navigator is suffering a back injury at the moment and a couple of weeks ago Dave asked me if I fancied navigating for him. Having only ever done track days, nurburgring etc. Of course I jumped at the chance and promptly applied for my MSA licence.
Our event was the Middlewick stages in Woodbridge, Suffolk. The event consisted of 8 special stages, all approx 9 miles long and in circa 40 min intervals. Our first being at 9:06am.
Getting to grips with working it all to rally time was straightforward, but the challenge of navigating was initially quite difficult when you're going through gates and trees at an almost unfathomable rate. We had a couple of overshoots in the first couple of stages and I made an error in SS3 where I miss called a split and cost us about 10/15 seconds. Bugger!
However we both really settled on SS4 and were really flying. The tiny Citroen with only 160bhp and the sequential box was absolutely stunning around the twisty rough airfield. The stages there forward we got quicker and quicker as I really settled into reading my notes without having to look where we were going and Dave was able to really push on.
At the end of the day we finished with only some minor bumper damage thanks to a close encountered cone and a melted rear bumper. (Due to a silencer we had to fit as our car was 108dB and the marshals needed us to bung it)
Our results were pretty good, we got the car home 2nd in class behind Johnny Ellis (Fiesta WRC S1600 car) and 9th overall of 39 cars. We even got ourselves some silverware.
I can honestly say it's the most fun I've ever had in a car and cannot wait to go again.
Here's some pics of the day. We have some incar which ill hopefully get downloaded this week.
Usual piss taking prevailed
