Even though we weren’t competing this year we still had a good day out watching the Woodpecker. After leaving the house slightly later than we wanted to, we missed the 1400’s going through Hay Park. We arrived just in time to see Perez and Burton followed by the rest of the 4 wheel drive cars. Standing on the outside of a downhill hairpin we had a great view of the cars and managed to escape the worst of the dust. Burton’s Peugeot Cosworth sounded awesome as it arrived at the corner and danced around it with ease. Perez took a more flamboyant approach to the hairpin in his Focus, still managing to entertain the gathered spectators. It was great to watch all the cars that I don’t get to see when competing on the events. Several of the Escorts nearly span at the hairpin and one of the BMW’s managed to go 360! In the afternoon we moved to a different spot on the stage, which overlooked a section of stage just after a crest and into a series of ‘S’ bends followed by a long right hander and then uphill. This time we managed to see all the 1400’s that were still running. Justin Lawson overtook Darren Pinchin at the long right hander and went on to win the 1400 category. Jayne Auden’s MG ZR struggled to get up the hill after stalling. She managed to get it going again and finished the event. Perez and Burton had both slipped down the order and we later learnt that Perez had stopped to change a puncture on SS4, costing him about 8 minutes. My phone ran out of battery seconds before Burton came into view. Which was annoying as I was going to take a video of him! After a mad scramble through the dust to get out of the stage we headed to the service area where we caught up with Geoff Jones, we had got an idea watching all the top cars going through the final stage. Perhaps we could rent his Subaru Impreza for the Grizedale Stages…watch this space for further updates!