COMPLETE CONSTRUCTION SERVICES RALLY 2002

Well what can we say, not a good rally !! Never mind the problems in the run up to the rally. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Having the week off for the run up to the rally made a refreshing change rather than just jumping into the rally.

The problems started early, which makes a change, as we normally leave it to the last minute. Tuesday night we were having some final engine tweaking, however we discovered the engine wasn't very well balanced. We found under high rpm there were sparks coming out of the gearbox bell housing. So we went away and had to strip out the gearbox and clutch to find out what was happening. However after taking it all out we discovered that there were no visible signs of any contact within the bell housing so with nothing else to do we reassembled it all and hope it had cured itself. Which luckily it had.

So with that problem fixed we set about sorting out some of the smaller jobs, nuts, bolts etc, all cabling tidied and so forth. Thursday night we had scrutineering which wasn't with out its dramas. Just as we arrived we found the left indicator had stopped working, not a problem as we have had this before just a loose earth. However nothing was working and it seemed to be getting worse. We ended up taking off the indicator lens to see what is wrong and it turns out the bulb had collapsed. Both the bulb and the base were fine and working they had just separated?? so with a new bulb in it all worked fine. The rest of the scrutineering went fine, except for the fact the the scrutineers now want towing eyes on both the front and rear of the car so they need to be fitted Friday morning.

Well anyway on to the rally itself. The event format is ten stages on the Friday night and then eight on the Saturday. The first two are the same, both long stages and road sections. However this gave the car time to warm up as it was a bitterly cold night. We arrived at the stage control on time and lined up behind the cars in front. We started the stage with no problems. Stage starts with a small incline before dropping down the valley to a reservoir, then following the edge of the reservoir before dropping down in front of the dam and then on to the finish.

We were probably about 300 metres before the end of the stage when we caught the car in front, he pulled over to the left and indicated allowing us to pass however as we pull along side he accelerated up the hill as well and there was a coming together putting us into a wall on the right and causing us to roll up the road, destroying the car. End