It has taken me a few months to sit down and write this. Before the rally I knew that I would have trouble remembering what had happened each day so I decided to leave myself a series of voice notes summarising each day of the event, with my thoughts. I listened to those voice notes to try and jog my memory of what I thought of the stages on each day and any problems and successes we had. However, the notes now make very little sense to me and mostly seem to be a series of rambling and correcting myself. On that note, I will try my best to summarise the five days of the Roger Albert Clark Rally and our experience of it.
Our friend Adrian Drury did the RAC rally in 2021 and this was when we really started to think we would like to do it too. We had two years to prepare ourselves, the car and a service team for the event. In March 2023, entries opened. We were delighted to find out that we had got an entry. Tyres were purchased, hotels were booked, Pacenotes were ordered, routes were reviewed, information packs were produced, Simon and Nigel Hunt were persuaded to come along and service. My brother Michael was roped in to come and do ‘catering’. Charlie Knifton decided he would also like to do the rally and would build a new group A spec Peugeot 205 for it. As most of the work on our car Betsy was done at Charlie’s farm we became a team.
Day -1 – Tuesday 21st November
Apart from myself, my license and the Pacenotes I only had to remember one thing. To bring the spare fuel can from my shed in Tewkesbury with me to Derby. I forgot it. This meant we had to borrow one from Simon at 20Ten racing. The one we ended up with leaked which resulted in a not insignificant amount of petrol being spilt in the boot of my car when we filled the cans at a garage in Heanor. After driving some miles with all my car windows open to air out the petrol smell we returned to Charlie’s farm in Smalley. We finished packing up the service van with food and drink and dispatched Michael and my uncle Peter to buy a bucket and sponge for cleaning the car numbers and windows. We decided to meet at Charlies Farm at 7am the following day to travel to Carmarthen.
Day 0 – Wednesday 22nd November
We set off for Carmarthen at just gone 7am. We arrived at the Livestock market just after lunch and unloaded the car from the trailer ready for scrutineering. Scrutineering was very straightforward and the car was passed. Then came the trouble with the trackers. The trackers were surprisingly large and we hadn’t realised that the units would need to be mounted in a position where they could ‘see the sky’ which had the potential to restrict the drivers view. We eventually got the trackers fitted to both the rally car and chase car with the help of a nice man from GeoTrak and an extra length of cable to lengthen the cable fitted to the car already. After signing on we checked into the hotel and had some food. We were apprehensive about the ceremonial start in the town centre in Carmarthen, thinking that not many people would want to stay to see the little cars. We were so pleasantly surprised with the amount of people who were there to watch! We queued along the street to get to the start ramp and were amazed to find ourselves driving into a sea of people. We got asked to sign autographs by some of the younger people who had come to watch. It was definitely worth it for the experience of seeing so many people excited about rallying.
Day 1 – Thursday 23rd November
After seeing us off onto the first road section Peter and Simon took the trailer to the trailer park at Walters Arena. We headed off for Crychan 1. It took a while to remember what to do, the last time we did a forest rally was in 2018. We enjoyed Crychan and Cefn. On Crychan 2 I lost my place in the notes which probably contributed to us being 30 seconds slower than on Crychan 1. However the surface had deteriorated with so many cars over it, so I feel I wasn’t entirely to blame. At some point during Walters Arena 1 the power steering stopped working. It was the first event that we have done since the power steering was fitted to Betsy and it would have been annoying if it had only lasted half a day of a five day event. Simon and Nigel changed the pump in the service and it seemed to behave for the rest of the day. Walters 1 was rough. Walters 2 was rougher and Patrick felt it had ruined his day. However we had finished day 1 with only minor issues. We discovered at the end of Thursday that there were two Clio’s running in our class, which we concluded must be turbo charged. The following day Nigel went to talk to the CLO and made him aware that the Clio’s were most likely turbo charged and by the start of Saturday they had been moved out of our class. Phew!
Day 2 – Friday 24th November
I can’t remember anything about Esgair Berfedd so my conclusion is that it went ok. Myherin was very, very muddy and slippy, but at least not rough. The Sweetlamb part of Sweetlamb/Hafren was very rough and rutted and meant we didn’t really get going until later in the stage when we went into Hafren. On the second run over Sweetlamb/Hafren the combination of watersplash and putting the spot lamps on killed the engine and we sat for a few seconds in amazement before the engine would restart. Friday night and the transit leg up to Carlisle is a blur of short sleeps in the car, coffees in petrol stations and Simon and Nigel jet washing the rally car at a garage somewhere along the route. We finally got to bed in an Air B’n’B ‘borrowed’ from Charlie at 01:30 on Saturday morning*.
Day 3 – Saturday 25th November
Ae and Dalbeattie were lovely stages. A bit of frost made for a great photo of the car in the stage. The service at Newton Stewart seemed to be on the longest road in the world. Especially when I walked/jogged the length of it after being dropped off near the in control to use the facilities. On Glencaird Hill 1 we hit a bad bump before a bridge and the heavy landing shot us almost completely off the road. On Glencaird Hill 2 I made sure to call out the bump and we got over it in a much more controlled manner. At the end of the day we realised that between us all we had forgotten to bring the trailer up to Newton Stewart. It was a long, noisy drive back to Carlisle in the rally car. Me and Michael made it to the hotel in time for last food orders in the adjacent pub and basically inhaled burgers and chips. We had mostly been surviving on pot noodle up until then. Three days of pot noodles will drive even the most dedicated pot noodle fan away from them. Patrick, Simon and Nigel stayed in service at Carlisle to work on the exhaust manifold on Betsy. They ended up changing the manifold for the spare and welding up the broken one. Then came the highlight of the week for Patrick. A chicken curry with rice and chips in the Carlisle market cafe.
Day 4 – Sunday 26th November
I felt very travel sick on the first two stages and was grateful to get back to service and take some anti-sickness tablets. The cough and cold that I’d had since before the rally started got a lot worse on Sunday and so I’m having a lot of trouble remembering what happened. Patrick’s recollection of Sunday is that the stages were very rough and bumpy, but he expected that from Kielder and was prepared. The manifold that had been replaced on Saturday night got damaged again in one of Sundays stages and once again Simon and Nigel changed it. This time in 45 minutes in service! Amazing! When checking stage times on Sunday evening we realised that Roger Mustoe in car 171, our close competitor and who we had been swapping class positions with must have had a problem in Harwood 2. We found out from Roger on Monday that he had gone into a ditch. He was there a long time waiting to be recovered, but said he was so tired he was glad of the rest!
Day 5 – Monday 27th November
Monday was all about preserving the car (and the crew!) to be able to do ‘The Big One’ – at 39 miles it was the longest stage I had ever done. We were both looking forward to the long stage. Me because I’d never done a stage that long and Patrick because he had done long stages in the past and knew what a challenge they could be. After the morning stages we went into service over the dam at Kielder and made sure that the car was as ready as possible. We had two new tyres and Betsy even got a wash! Following this we had a two hour wait in a holding control whilst the order of the field was reversed and then we were off to ‘The Big One’. We were going quite well (so we thought) until 10 miles from the end of the stage the brakes failed. We backed off to try and nurse the car to the end of the stage, we didn’t want a stage maximum so close to the end of the event. Somewhere in the last 10 miles an escort caught us up and we moved over to let him past. We were surprised that he didn’t pull away from us very quickly and we followed him to the end of the stage. After the finish control we both stopped and the driver of the escort came over and explained that he had been on his roof in a ditch and the co-drivers Pacenotes were lost somewhere in the car. He had wanted to follow us to the end of the stage, not for us to let him past!
We made it back to the service in Carlisle and decided that we would like to go over the finish ramp. It felt like such a huge achievement to finish the event! We were especially pleased not have any nominal times. We were also delighted to have finished third in our class and to get an award at the awards ceremony. The event was fantastic and very enjoyable despite the challenges (both competitive and logistical) and we would very much like to do it again in 2025. If anyone knows of someone looking to sponsor a blue Peugeot 205 XS please let us know! 😉
*Charlie had returned to Derby to try and mend a broken engine and so didn’t need to stay Friday night in the cottage he had rented near Carlisle. He was kind enough to let us ‘borrow’ it for the night.