When I last wrote here in Rallycross World prior to Lydden Hill I was starting to get the feeling that we might not make it to the first round of the European Rallycross Championship. I sit here now having  contested not only the first round but the third round in France too.

The build up to Lydden Hill was frantic to say the least. With 15 or so days to go the car still hadn’t been rolling road tested and I still didn’t have my dogbox back from Gripper. We eventually got to the rolling road at JabbaSport where the mapping went well, and although there wasn’t any more power than in 2010 the vernier pulleys have made for a much wider power-band and a much more drivable car.

Back at the workshop, there was still the issue of affording to get to Lydden, I still had to pay for my gearbox and all the work that had been done to it. My trailer has been getting a bit long in the tooth for a while, so I spent some early mornings tidying it up and duly sold it to try and find the budget to race. I had to borrow the money for the gearbox, thanks to MB Motorsport (again!), which arrived on the Monday before the event. The last week was a mad dash to get the car ready, fitting the gearbox, painting and fitting all the panels on the car and sorting out the hundreds of little jobs.

Incredibly we did get to Lydden, thanks to a lot of help from so many people, and a lot of very late nights and even earlier mornings. To add to the issues, with a week to go the brakes on my van decided to play up and despite trying almost everything we couldn’t solve the problem. British championship racer Phil Chicken kindly came to my rescue and, despite already lending me a trailer since I had sold mine, also provided the use of his Transit van.

During practice at Lydden the car felt much better than it had in the previous year, the better gear ratios and bigger power band made for a much more drivable car. Before the weekend we hadn’t been able to get the suspension geometry exactly how we would have liked, but we had spent a long time setting it up and it certainly seemed to have made a big difference.

During the second practice session we broke the same engine steady that we had broken at the last event of 2010 in the Czech Republic. The repair done by Gripper hadn’t worked. It was either finish there and then or improvise. We decided to make a new engine mount, finding steel in the paddock wasn’t too hard, but finding somebody with a welder was incredibly difficult. Almost all the teams had most parts of a welder, but almost always were missing something crucial. We did eventually get a new engine mount made, and although it needed strengthening over the course of the weekend it certainly did its job.

We missed timed practice as a result of having to make an engine mount, so it wasn’t until the first heat that we discovered the suspension travel was bottoming out over the bumps especially at the bottom of the hill, the back of the car was all over the place so that knocked my confidence a bit. We raised the car quite significantly overnight, and in warm-up on day two it felt much better. Heat two was then our best race to date, I took the Joker Lap on the first lap and once Willem Veltman had also taken the alternative I was able to stay within a second of him for the rest of the race, only his power advantage keeping him ahead. I have always seen Veltman and Harrie Deelen as the first on our ‘to beat list’. In Poland last year I was 11.5 seconds behind Deelen over a race distance. In the second heat at Lydden, after we both had clean runs, I was just over a second behind. To have found 10 seconds over the winter really made it all worth while, and made me even more determined to find more. The third heat wasn’t so good, a suspension top-mount broke which made the handling interesting to say the least, but we left the event very happy overall.

Portugal – too far to race

The next event on the calendar was Portugal, and I had decided long before the season started not to even try to race in the championship’s most southern event. It appears many other people felt the same, with only 16 cars in both Supercar and Super1600 and eight in Touring Car. I went to the event to work for the new RallycrossWorld.com news site, and the general feeling in the paddock was that Portugal is just too far in these financially difficult times. Kenneth Hansen confessed to enjoy the event Portugal, but suggested that the ‘last 1700km’ killed it for him really. Says it all…

Freestyle mapping

France was my next port of call, but again this wouldn’t have been possible without massive generosity and help from a number of people. The first thing we had to do was make a new engine mount, repair the old one and with the two working together hope it would be much better. We also made some big changes to the rear suspension geometry, and for the first time in many events actually achieved the set-up we desired. Adding weight was also on the list, all the lightening we had done over the winter had actually put the car under the weight limit, so some big weights were placed in the car with the help of the corner weight scales to help put them in the right place. The final part of the pre-France jigsaw was the fuel tank. Each FIA tank is homologated for a certain period of time, and as I bought mine second hand, it ended its homologation at the end of April. You are able to get a two year extension but it has to be inspected by the manufacturer in order to do this, which is a time consuming and expensive process. It arrived back just in the nick of time.

Mr Chicken very kindly again gave me the use of his van and trailer for France, although this time he drove it, the first time I have done a Rallycross event in my life and not had to drive to the circuit myself. We arrived on Friday lunchtime, after travelling all night to minimise time away. Scrutineering went fine, and all looked good.

On Friday evening there was a lot of talk in the paddock about how strict the French are on noise limits. My car pops and bangs on over-run, but my ECU does have a feature with which to turn this off. I plugged in the laptop and did this, but the car wouldn’t start. I must confess to never having done anything with mapping, and it appears some misunderstanding between me and the guy that mapped the car had led to me wiping out all data contained in the ECU…

Lots of phone calls back to England, and nowhere could we find the back-up for the engine MAP. At midnight – after borrowing Derek Tohill’s hirecar (sorry about the puncture, Derek!) – I was in a friend’s hotel room using the wi-fi and downloading the original base map we had used to first get my car running. But this wasn’t even for my engine and we didn’t know if it would start. The car did start, but we were concerned about it damaging the engine. The general consensus was that it was better for the fuel mixture to be too rich than too lean to avoid melting a piston, so over the course of the weekend, after advice from lots of people in the paddock we continued to develop our guess-work map, making it run the engine richer, to try and avoid the massive expense of an engine failure while also trying to mke it run competitively. The first couple of practices felt okay, we were amazed the car was running at all but we were a long way off the pace. The first heat felt better, but after riding the kerb a bit hard in the first corner we again broke the engine steady, and this then tore the threads off the new front mount.

We reverted back to the improvised mount we had made at Lydden Hill and, in warm-up on Sunday, the car felt good, although down on power compared to Lydden. It was riding the bumps and kerbs really well and gave me a lot of confidence in the fast corners. The second heat went even better, but I was racing with a lot of cars that hadn’t got a time in the first heat and would normally belong much higher up the order, so I did my own thing and set an alright time.

The third heat was much better still, I got a brilliant start and lead into the first corner. A big push up the back gave me the hurry up and I got my head down to try and pull out as much of a gap as I could. Now, the Joker Lap had been very, very slippery all weekend, requiring the handbrake to get round. As I Jokered on the last lap there was much more grip than before, I made a mistake and wasn’t as tidy as I could have been, and only just lost the lead. That wasn’t important though, we had led our first ERC race on merit, and even more importantly, lead Deleen until I’d made a mistake.

I will be missing Norway and Sweden for the same reason as Portugal, on a very small budget they are just too far away. My dream of racing at Höljes will have to wait for at least another year.

What we did do is leave France knowing is that the car desperately needs more power. Handling wise it is really good, but we do need more power. Somehow I am going to have to find the money to have a proper, Super1600 style exhaust manifold made for it before it has to be re-mapped, and then I really am hoping to test before Belgium in August (sounds good at least!). Aside from that there are a few repairs to do but nothing major, just the usual crazy amount of time that these cars require in running repairs.

There are always loads of people to thank but a few have really gone out of their way to help me start this season. They all know who they are and I hope they all realise how amazingly grateful I am!