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As some of you know, I've spent 18 months turning a neglected 1971 Scimitar into something I could use for Historic Road Rally's
Scimitar Restoration
After a slightly rushed paint job, everything was ready for my first event last weekend...
Leukaemia Historic Road Rally - 12th May 2012
Historic Road Rally's consist of Special Tests on private land, and slow speed Regularity's on the public road where the aim is to maintain a constant speed such as 20mph for 4 miles and at any point you can come across a control where they check this. I'd entered this event with Cath Woodman as she regularly competes on Historic events, but she had to drop out due to unforeseen circumstances, so my regular Road Rally navigator Georgina Clark stepped in. As it was her first Historic we found a few quiet lanes the weekend before and did 6 miles practising the Regularity sections which involves Speed tables, an accurate TripMeter and 2 stop watches, and it all went well
On the Friday I bought some secondhand forest tyres from Steve Harkness and had them fitted as I was expecting some forest tests. Later I headed over for scrutineering which was passed without any problems and came back for the night. On Saturday we got there nice and early to have some breakfast with the other 50 crews before collecting the road book an hour before the start. The Leukaemia has been running for 20 years and often uses Caerwent for Special Tests, but unfortunately this year there is no rallying at Caerwent so they were using various car parks and just a few miles of forest for the 21 Tests, and there were 7 Regularity's to plot - we managed to get 6 of them down before we left the start
The first Test was just down the road round a rather mucky recycling plant, which was ok apart from one very tight hairpin round a line of metal skips where I had to do a 3 point turn. The next 2 were on an industrial estate and a bit more open and our times were better. Soon it was onto the first Regularity and it was going smoothly until we got held up in a narrow lane by some traffic and dropped 36s in total, but still a good start. Some more very compact tests around car parks followed (which were hard work in the Scimitar - she's got a good turning circle but the handbrake's not good enough to lock the wheels and there's no LSD yet) before a rather brief coffee stop mid morning
Back on the road it was straight into Regularity 2 over some open moorland roads, we did well again although the results show us dropping nearly 4 minutes due to the clocks being miles out
A couple more tests followed before 2 in a forest not far from Usk. The first one was 0.6 miles, nice and open and reasonably smooth and we were about 18th quickest, but the next one was 1 mile long and started with a very tight hairpin through a deep ford which caused problems for a lot of crews. I did a 3 point turn round the hairpin, took the ford slowly and got through ok and the rest of the test was good, just a couple of bumpy parts and trouble getting traction in places, we were well off the pace on this one. A few miles down the road was the lunch halt which they had extended to give crews some more time - we arrived with the engine rather hot and everything sounded a bit louder than when we'd started 
After a quick lunch we were surprised to find ourselves in 20th place but I was worried we'd have to call it a day if I couldn't fix the overheating. The electric fan had packed up, presumably through the deep ford, but luckily it was just a blown fuse. I looked underneath and found one rear silencer was gone (the car behind us came across it in the forest) and I tied the remaining parts to the chassis and hoped they would stay there for the rest of the event. Meanwhile Geroge had plotted the last Regularity
Regularity 3 followed only dropping 13s although we thought we were lost at one point, we seemed to go a long way to the control but it turned out to be correct and this looped us back round to the 2 forest tests again. I took it a bit easier this time (and turned off the fan to go through the ford) but set very similar times although everyone else got faster. Regularity 4 we had a slight issue with a Discovery doing 15mph past a reservoir which made us late at one control but only 12s in total dropped on this one which was as good as the top guys were doing
3 more tests mixed in with the last 3 Regularity's took us round Newport Steelworks, we were improving all the time on the Regularity's and only dropped 3s on the last one - only one other crew matched this
There should have been 3 more tests on the way to the Finish, all ones we had done earlier but the rally was running an hour behind so the organisers took the sensible decision to cancel these. After a nice buffet there were some results up which showed us in 19th but with quite a lot of dodgy times - Regularity 2 we had over 10 min of penalties which was clearly impossible, and Regularity 5 was 2 minutes out. A few queries later (not just from me), Regularity 2 was down to 4 mins (still wrong but I couldn't prove my point well enough so it stood) and Regularity 5 down to 9s which was correct
All this brought us up to 14th Overall and 4th in Class - we were both very pleased, the car ran well and has plenty of power when I get a chance to use it, and George did an excellent job all round doing a lot better than some of the regular Historic navigators. Some tweaks are planned before the next event in June
Scimitar Restoration
After a slightly rushed paint job, everything was ready for my first event last weekend...
Leukaemia Historic Road Rally - 12th May 2012
Historic Road Rally's consist of Special Tests on private land, and slow speed Regularity's on the public road where the aim is to maintain a constant speed such as 20mph for 4 miles and at any point you can come across a control where they check this. I'd entered this event with Cath Woodman as she regularly competes on Historic events, but she had to drop out due to unforeseen circumstances, so my regular Road Rally navigator Georgina Clark stepped in. As it was her first Historic we found a few quiet lanes the weekend before and did 6 miles practising the Regularity sections which involves Speed tables, an accurate TripMeter and 2 stop watches, and it all went well
On the Friday I bought some secondhand forest tyres from Steve Harkness and had them fitted as I was expecting some forest tests. Later I headed over for scrutineering which was passed without any problems and came back for the night. On Saturday we got there nice and early to have some breakfast with the other 50 crews before collecting the road book an hour before the start. The Leukaemia has been running for 20 years and often uses Caerwent for Special Tests, but unfortunately this year there is no rallying at Caerwent so they were using various car parks and just a few miles of forest for the 21 Tests, and there were 7 Regularity's to plot - we managed to get 6 of them down before we left the start
The first Test was just down the road round a rather mucky recycling plant, which was ok apart from one very tight hairpin round a line of metal skips where I had to do a 3 point turn. The next 2 were on an industrial estate and a bit more open and our times were better. Soon it was onto the first Regularity and it was going smoothly until we got held up in a narrow lane by some traffic and dropped 36s in total, but still a good start. Some more very compact tests around car parks followed (which were hard work in the Scimitar - she's got a good turning circle but the handbrake's not good enough to lock the wheels and there's no LSD yet) before a rather brief coffee stop mid morning
Back on the road it was straight into Regularity 2 over some open moorland roads, we did well again although the results show us dropping nearly 4 minutes due to the clocks being miles out
A couple more tests followed before 2 in a forest not far from Usk. The first one was 0.6 miles, nice and open and reasonably smooth and we were about 18th quickest, but the next one was 1 mile long and started with a very tight hairpin through a deep ford which caused problems for a lot of crews. I did a 3 point turn round the hairpin, took the ford slowly and got through ok and the rest of the test was good, just a couple of bumpy parts and trouble getting traction in places, we were well off the pace on this one. A few miles down the road was the lunch halt which they had extended to give crews some more time - we arrived with the engine rather hot and everything sounded a bit louder than when we'd started After a quick lunch we were surprised to find ourselves in 20th place but I was worried we'd have to call it a day if I couldn't fix the overheating. The electric fan had packed up, presumably through the deep ford, but luckily it was just a blown fuse. I looked underneath and found one rear silencer was gone (the car behind us came across it in the forest) and I tied the remaining parts to the chassis and hoped they would stay there for the rest of the event. Meanwhile Geroge had plotted the last Regularity
Regularity 3 followed only dropping 13s although we thought we were lost at one point, we seemed to go a long way to the control but it turned out to be correct and this looped us back round to the 2 forest tests again. I took it a bit easier this time (and turned off the fan to go through the ford) but set very similar times although everyone else got faster. Regularity 4 we had a slight issue with a Discovery doing 15mph past a reservoir which made us late at one control but only 12s in total dropped on this one which was as good as the top guys were doing
3 more tests mixed in with the last 3 Regularity's took us round Newport Steelworks, we were improving all the time on the Regularity's and only dropped 3s on the last one - only one other crew matched this
There should have been 3 more tests on the way to the Finish, all ones we had done earlier but the rally was running an hour behind so the organisers took the sensible decision to cancel these. After a nice buffet there were some results up which showed us in 19th but with quite a lot of dodgy times - Regularity 2 we had over 10 min of penalties which was clearly impossible, and Regularity 5 was 2 minutes out. A few queries later (not just from me), Regularity 2 was down to 4 mins (still wrong but I couldn't prove my point well enough so it stood) and Regularity 5 down to 9s which was correctAll this brought us up to 14th Overall and 4th in Class - we were both very pleased, the car ran well and has plenty of power when I get a chance to use it, and George did an excellent job all round doing a lot better than some of the regular Historic navigators. Some tweaks are planned before the next event in June
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