News - BEGA VALLEY RALLY

Team News from MRT

BEGA VALLEY RALLY
Round three of the NSW state rally championships

Seeded at car 2 behind last years champion, Miles Sandy and Col Trinder, I was satisfied to pull out car 5 on the road at the pre event lottery for road starting position for the top 5 cars.
As the event was not dusty, this position allowed us to watch the cars in front to pace ourselves!
The event is held on the long weekend that "celebrates" the Queens birthday, (for overseas people this is not really her birthday, but its a good excuse for a holiday!) With scrutiny on the Saturday, rally Sunday, drive home Monday.

Bega is a 6-7 hours South of Sydney on the East Coast of NSW, its prime cattle and sheep country and well known for its Cheese! In the rally community, its well known for its great roads, although these days the roads for used Special Stage's are not as many as in the past.

Saturday was chilly (its winter in OZ at present) yet sunny, ironically it absolutely poured with rain Saturday nite and was intermittent on The first Sunday, Monday was again like Saturday. (so typical so far for this years State rally events!)

Stages were "typical" Bega, fantastic shire roads of hard smooth white gravel, recent rains made them sticky and the added grip benefited MRT with their closed tread Falken type D rally tyres. Some crews had elected to run full wets however this was possibly incorrect as whilst they worked well on the very wet areas of the stages, the dryer parts would wear out the tyres much faster.

By SS 4 MRT were consistently setting stages times within the top 3, notably fast crews were those with Co drivers with good local knowledge, as this event was a "blind" event, and pace notes were banned, however the stages run are almost the same every year so, I was not surprised to see an absence of brake (skid) marks on crests we were slowing on, esp. seeing we were car 5!! (and had limited road knowledge)

The car was going well and the recent update to our dog gear box was also working a treat, although a little difficult to get used to at first. On going R/D is our aim in some events and we also tested a new front LSD to compare to the "regular": STi Plate type diff we have used in the past.

Out in front Howard Grove and David Sinclair were putting their new "big" brake upgrade to the test and setting some strong stage times, Howard is a real gun and is always on the pace, David also has good experience and this was showing in their times.

Miles Sandy and Col Trinder in their updated Subaru Impreza (to ver 4 spec) were also using all their Group A power to keep ahead of the Lancer of Grove and Sinclair, the two teams swapping outright times. Pre event testing by Miles was paying off, he runs DMS suspension and a MRT gear set, I look forward to comparing stage times when we have similar engines, our group N power is no match for the incredible grunt his car has. We were 3rd and happy with our pace, not taking any risks I was watching the brake points of the cars in front and "measuring" my concentration by how far I could leave our brake points past the marks left by others in front! Sometimes this got a little scary! The car was running well and other crews were all chasing the fast pace set by the consistent runners at the front of the field.

Special Stage 6 and Grove dropped a heap of time with a loose electrical plug. whilst, the crew of John Holster and Gareth Monoghan were out soon after with gearbox selector problems. This was Johns first event after 18mths off after his big accident in Canberra 2000, and he was still keen to be on the pace.

Chris Judson and Brett Wright in an Impreza WRX Group A originally from New Zealand was relishing his new (recently rebuilt) engines power and putting it to good use, setting some strong stage times, he was lying in a strong position in the top ten, before his gearbox said enough and he parked it with a box full of neutrals.

SS8 saw the end of the rally for us, 9km into the 30 km stage and we smacked a bank after running wide on sharp (slippery) corner, this broke the rear drive shaft and left us with only 3 wheel drive. Not realising the problem, I commented that something was wrong (to Andrew) and we pressed on, with the centre and rear LSD working overtime! Eventually the centre LSD started to fail and eventually we broke a front drive shaft as well!
By this time two opposing drive shafts and some (very) tired LSD's cried enough and we crawled off the road and parked the car for some spectating!

Miles and his team went onto a well deserved win followed by local hot shot Ben Barker in his Lancer and Campbell Waller in his ageing (yet still fast!) VR4 was 3rd.

Even though we did not finish, I was very satisfied with our (consistent) stage times and glad that the car is going strong, silly failures like this are hard to predict and the rear drive shafts we run are the large ones and not known for failure.

Andrew and I certainly look forward to Adelaide....

Point worth a laugh.
Andrew and I had a long wait with 2 min intervals and over 50 cars to pass us by, so after a sleep in the car we awoke to see the sweep car and no service crew (they are usually close behind when we DNF!) to see.

We later find out that two of our crew whom were doing end of stage emergency servicing in the MRTP (Charade) loan car had elected to take a short cut through a fire trail to save time to get to us!.

Driving a 2wd car down a narrow track they arrived at a creek crossing to find the other side exit was way to steep, they turned around to return the way they came, only to realise it also was a lot steeper than it looked when they came down!

5 tries at warp speed exiting the creek they failed to make it up the hill, even after they emptied all the fuel, rally tyres, jack, tools and spares, they still could not get out, so they walked 2km back to the main forest road to hitch hike back to the main service to meet the main MRT service truck. Armed with winch and snatch strap the team walked back into the car, got it out and then, went the long way around to get to us, by this time some 30 mins after the sweep car had left and approximately 1 1/2 hours after they found we had stopped in the stage!

After all they had to keep them selves busy!

Our next event is Adelaide where we hope to also have our new Group A engine ready..

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