Midland Rally Sport First Rally Results.

On Sunday 25th April the Midland Rally Sport team took part in the first rally called Oak Leaf Stages at Swynnerton Army Training Camp. This is co-driver Steve Whitehorn’s report of the event.
Car 50 – Paul Daniels and Steve Whitehorn, Midland Rally Sport.
Our first ever stage rally began with a night’s stay at a local inn. If the anxiety wasn’t enough to put me off sleeping, the karoake directly below going on until the early hours of the morning certainly would!
We arrived at the army camp just before 7.00am on Sunday, and our service crew shortly afterwards. A quick final check over the car and all that was left to do was wait. Drivers’ briefing was short and sweet and the first cars started at 10.00am, with us 27 minutes behind at the back.
Swynnerton army camp has a network of roads, on which five different courses were planned. The rally consisted of two runs on each course, a total of ten stages. From Service Out Control, we had a three quarter of a mile drive over gravel to the stage start. We soon got to the starting lights, saw green and our first stage began.
We approached the first stage ‘cautiously’. I use this term carefully, since Paul wasted no time in getting the revs up to 6000 at every opportunity. But we didn’t take any chances at the corners, as our main goal was to finish. We completed the first stage with a respectable time, but on arriving at the stage finish, we engulfed the marshall in smoke from the brakes! The following 20 minutes in service saw the wheels removed and the brakes allowed to cool. Paul received a gentle advisory note to ‘ease off the middle pedal a bit’.
Stage 2 was a repeat of Stage 1, Stage 3 was going fine until I realised that I was reading off the map for Stage 5 EEEK! I just managed to reorganise myself in time to warn Paul of an impending hairpin, to be later followed by apologies to the service crew for making him ‘warm’ the brakes again.
The drama began after Stage 4, as the gearbox linkage went loose. With only 20 minutes of service time, the crew frantically set to work. Four
tie-wraps later and the problem was solved, and we were back out in time for Stage 5.
During Stage 7, we had reason to cheer as we passed a Fiat Uno that we knew to be in our class, having suffered a problem and pulled out. We subsequently leapt to third in our class out of four remaining runners.
By Stage 9, we were really into the swing of things. Paul was squeezing every last bit of performance from the car and I was encouraging him further. We put in a good time and then improved it by 34 seconds on the repeat stage to finish the rally.
We had only set out on this rally with the aim of finishing. With a car built to BTRDA Rally First rules, no engine modifications, competing against fully modified 1400s, we expected to be the last of the runners. We were therefore very surprised to find we had jumped the Silverstone Scholarship MG ZR to second in class by 90 seconds! Suffice to say we were well chuffed and received nothing but praise from friends and family.
Huge thanks goes to Baz for all his advice and for all the kit and service van, we really appreciated it, thank you and to Mrs Wheeler (probably the first ever heavily pregnant service crew member!), Mike Jordan for stepping in as mechanic and giving us advice on the day, Dhiren Solanki, Kyle Abell and our friendly scrutineer Nathan Marriott. Thank you all!! Roll on the Rally of the Midlands!
Steve Whitehorn