Luton Carnival ’08

It was pissing down but still a good day. Get ready for photo spam.

11th May autotest

My first go and motorsport, woohoo! After a few of the CT guys said they’d be going I thought I’d pop along. It was only 40odd miles away in Northampton. Sadly none of them turned up but that means I get 11 points for myself. 😀

Short story long – I’m happy with what I did. At the start I was nine second behind the fastest guy and by the end I was two seconds behind. I can’t ask for more than that. The idea is that the organisers set out cones on a flat surface (grass, gravel, tarmac) and you have to drive a set route around those cones. On this event there were eight course – two attempts at each and the fastest times from each get added together to form a total. Fastest time wins. This was on gravel and the surface was a little uneven to say the least. I won’t be doing it again in the Herald after polishing the inside of the wheelarchs with the tyres…

You learn so much at these events. Not just simple things like car control but also the way these events work. The ideas behind how the cars are used and also what cars. For instance, I made a mistake on one course. I was delighted with myself because my version of it meant going through some very tight lines the wrong way and I thought I’d done really well. 😀 The second attempt saw me make another mistake and I canceled the go by driving off. It wasn’t until I parked up that I was told all I had to do was reverse and start from where I’d made the mistake and that now I’d get the time of the fastest guy plus thirty seconds. Of well. 🙂

Anyhoo here’s a video of the car getting a bit of use… Shame it’s not as fast as I could have gone but I had to do it all in second gear. Ever tried lighting up the rears in second gear even on gravel? 😀

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ5ujbhJlvE

The Canal Jumper

It’s been almost a week so I’ve forgotten most of what happened! I’ll get it out of the way quickly. *ahem* 31 fails… SO… erm… 😀

This one was in Northampton and started at 6:30pm. Despite leaving at 4:30pm we were still late. We couldn’t find the pub. Still, the walk by the canal was nice. When we got to the pub car park we found the other entrants. Gotta say, good turn-out from CT.

We decided to enter at the novice level – everyone got the same clues but novice people got a cheat sheet. We went back to the car and started to plot the route. This one was easier than last except I kept expecting to get caught out with crafty clues so struggled. There were no dodgy tricks and when we realised and started to look at things simply it fell into place. We did have a lot of help from Don though. The two and a half hour record was dashed and we set off before daylight. I’m proud we managed to do the plotting in the same time as Ellis and Dale.

There were some very nice roads and one or two puddles. Sadly we got lost. Steve was struggling with getting a mental image of the map as I was driving and couldn’t always say if I needed to turn left or right. Not that I can comment as I turned left out of the car park to go home when I should have turned right. I flashed past Doug as he was coming out of the car park and we had a natter at some traffic lights furth on. In total we probably put an extra 10 or so miles onto what we should have done. We also had to cut out section eight as time was short.

Just after pulling out of the car park Ellis’ car pulled over. I think he was checking if we were following him. We weren’t. 🙂 One thing though, check your brake lights. I almost went up your arse! 😀

I’m still learning. I’m slowly getting the hang of plotting routes but need to remember that’s the job of the navigater and should leave it to them. How else will they be familiar with the route when I’m driving? And we also need to make sure we clearly mark where sections end. Oh, and that there’s no need to belt along at 50mph if you’re not being timed… Far less chance of a mistake if you take your time. On Monday I marked up my maps after seeing how Doug had done his.

Here are the clues and the cheat sheet to show others what to expect of a rally.