Monday 12 October 2009

National Junior Rally Champions!

Hi All,
An up and down few weeks, but it has all come to a perfect end, National Junior Rally Champions, and a third place finish overall in Birr yesterday. It's turning out to be a fairytale season, with three championships already ticked off, with the possibility of a World championship on top of it, what more could you ask for in a debut year.
Anyway, we had a rally in a 4wd GpN car the week after Clare, the Bushwhacker rally. It went ok, and I was reasonably happy. We were 14th overall in the end.
We flew straight from here to Salou for Raly Spain. We started recce on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday. Shakedown on Thursday, and a trip to Portaventura (Still a child really :) ) and we were ready to go. Friday started off ok, we caught Anthony Martin on the first stage and lost a few seconds to Greek driver Lambros Anthanasoulos (Winner of the PWRC Round in Acropolis this year). Lambros took time again from us on the next two stages, but then he had a brake problem and spun, elevating us to the lead by 8 seconds. Then we had trouble of out own, an untraceable electrical problem was cutting the car off after 8km of each stage, and would continue to do so until the end of the stage. Each time it cut out, I had to turn the master switch on and off to fire it up again, it was very frustrating. Still, we managed to maintain a 3 second lead into Saturday morning, and Tom and the crew from M-Sport were going to have a go and see if they could fix the problem in service.
On Saturday morning, we had the longest stage of the rally, El Priorat at 38km, was the longest stage I had ever driven. It was a disaster for us. Unfortunately, although everything was done to cure the electrical problem, it was still there, and we dropped over a minute on the stage. With two shorter stages before service, we knew we really had to push to try and win. We were fastest on these two stages, but only by a small margin. We returned to service and yet more parts were changed to cure the problem, and we set out to do the 38km stage once more. The problem had still not been fixed, and we were having to drive around the problem. It was hard work, and I was concentrating hard on trying to get around the problem without dropping much time, and unfortunately I heard a pacenote wrong in the confusion, and put the car off the road, and ending our day, and more importantly our chances of a win in FSTi. It was heartbreaking to watch Lambros drive past, but all we could do is focus on fixing the car for SupeRally, and trying to get as many fastest stage times as we could on Sunday. We got the car back at around 6pm and the guys worked until 1am that night to get it ready. We were able to restart on Sunday, and work out way back up to 4th in FSTi, and score 8 fastest times in total for the rally, thus keeping our championship alive!
It was straight back to Sweet lamb for the Pirelli Star Driver shootout then. We had two good days there, and Keith Cronin was eventually the winner, and I wish him all the best in his exploits next year. I'll also take this opportunity to congratulate him on his fantastic win in the BRC, going along with the recent trend of success in Irish Rallying, It's shaping up to be a great year.
While I'm in a good mood :) I would like to thank all the guys that helped put the car back into shape in Spain. Tom, Monty, Dad, Pat, and Dai, without you, the championship would have been over for sure.
And so it came to last weekend in Birr, and our third championship in the one year. It was a great day, setting some real giant killing times, eventually finishing 3rd overall, first junior, and National Junior Rally Champions!
So now we focus on Rally GB in two weeks, where we need to good points to ensure the World Championship. Finally after 6 weeks, I am allowed to return fully to training, and it cannot come soon enough! So I am looking forward to that I can tell you!
Keep posted for more updates,
Craig