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!

All winter long I have been trying to get into a position where it would not be a rush to finish the Clio ready for the 2011 season, with time in hand to go testing and fettle before the start of the year.

Today, as I write this, there are 22 todays to go. I still have no gearbox, the engine in the car is running, albeit currently on the old inlet manifold, and time is disappearing fast.

The new inlet manifold is almost finished, hours and hours of fabrication have gone into it, of course the benefits will overweigh anything else in the end, but you do question what you are doing when you are porting lumps of aluminium at 6am, before real work starts!

Real work has meant the Clio hasn’t had full attention over the last few weeks, the priority has been to finish MB Motorsports’ cars for the first round of the British Championship at Lydden Hill last weekend. Now that is out of the way the Clio my priority. Jabbasport is having the car on its rolling road on April 7 – six days from now. Hopefully this will be problem free, but you can never be sure until you have finished and on the way home with the end result.

The gearbox manufacturers had finished the new differential, but had a problem with heat treating the pinion, so that was no good. They are now putting everything they can into getting the gearbox built and sorted for the end of next week … I’m told. So it won’t be in place for the trip to Jabbasport but it should be in not long after.

Testing is now, at best, unlikely, but that isn’t something I’m unused to. When we got to Lydden last year we didn’t even know if the car would go around a corner, never mind if I would actually be able to drive it. I am a lot more confident about driving the car, and with the improvements we have made over the winter we should have a much more competitive package.

The car currently looks more sorry for itself than ever, although new panels are either waiting to be painted in a slightly new design or are on the way here. We do now have an incredibly lightweight fibreglass door, which I collected at the British event at Lydden Hill, (thanks to Adam Walker). With all this we should be somewhere near the weight limit this season.  With the limit being raised by 50kg and my car having been  on a bit of a diet, I think we are going to have gained almost 80kg on those who were on the weight limit last year.

Earlier this year “Mad Mark” was joking around and asked me “are you going to race this year, Hal, or are you just going to write about it?” It’s sad to see that Mark probably won’t be racing now, but unless I dash now and get some work done, I’m in danger of joining him on the sidelines!

See you all at Lydden Hill for the first round of ERC 2011, I will be doing everything I can to get there as a driver!

As is said by many, motor sport is often 90% heartache, 10% totally uncontrollable joy. But despite this, that tiny percentage of joy is so amazingly worthwhile it keeps you going through the rough stuff. Annoyingly for most, a lot of the aggravation in motor sport must be from the length of time it can take suppliers to supply their goods and services. Pat Doran once said to me: “If you order something in motor sport with a deadline in mind, nine times out of 10 you will miss that deadline. In any other walk of life and business this would be totally unacceptable, and yet in motor sport it is just accepted as the norm”. And he’s right. Things seem to take forever.

I am yet to get my gearbox back from Gripper, but the specialists there have now solved the issues that brought us to a halt in Poland last season, and are now in the process of making a new crownwheel and pinion for the differential to cure the gear ratio problems. The calculations have been done: last season at 8000rpm in fifth gear, the Clio would have done over 140mph! Not what you need in a Super1600 Rallycross car on European Rallycross circuits.

While I have to wait a little longer for the gearbox, I now have the con-rods for the engine, and the correct bolts as – surprise, surprise – the first ones supplied were wrong. The engine should be back in the car within the next week or so. I then have to sort out some pipework for new oil pressure gauges and the like before, hopefully, a trip to the rolling road. Unfortunately  I don’t think the gearbox will be back for another couple of weeks, so the car will be mapped without the close ratio dog box, but I am very keen to get the engine sorted as soon as possible so we can have as much time as we can to try and iron out any problems that may occur. Then, once the engine is mapped and the gearbox is back with us, I intend to take the car testing on at least one occasion before the first round of the ERC.

However, my testing will be weather dependent, and if that  doesn’t improve in the coming weeks I may not be able to get too much ‘loose’ testing in. I’m still woprking with MB Motorsport and, a couple of weeks ago we took an Audi A4 rally car to Blyton in order for Michael Boak to give some driver tuition. The car only did a handful of laps before we experienced clutch failure. Even with the small amount of laps involved the circuit was so wet and muddy that it still took me almost three-hours to pressure wash the car, and it still needs more cleaning yet. I don’t fancy trying to test the Clio on what was a half ploughed field to learn little and spend countless hours trying to clean it again. So we could well find ourselves testing at a kart circuit a couple of times prior to Lydden, but any testing will be 100% better than what we managed last year – absolutely no testing whatsoever.

More bits have been arriving for the car over the past weeks in the usual sort of way I have to do things. I bought four new wheels, for instance. These came fitted with road tyres which were taken off and sold to ease the cost of the wheels.

Oh, and the fitness training has been going well as a whole, although I fear the nearer we get to the Rallycross season the amount of time available for this will decrease in direct proportion to the number of hours required to get things ready on both my car and those of MB Motorsport’s customers.

The season is drawing ever closer, I won’t jinx anything by suggesting how things are going but I’ve got everything crossed that we have it a little bit easier in the run up to round one. But you know what they say about not counting your chickens…

One last thing, I want to wish Adam and Gemma Clark all the best for the future following their wedding last weekend. I’m sure they will both have a great time racing in the Swift Championship this season, and on to bigger, better, European things in the future!

Ever get the feeling of deja vu?

One evening not long after I had written the last shoestring I was sorting spare parts for Dave Tulett’s newly bought Seat Ibiza SuperModified car when I got a call from Frankie Boak, who builds my engine. “Are you sitting down?” said the voice on the other end if the line. I must say at this point that I am no longer surprised by this type of conversation, given the trials and tribulations with building the Clio. “The con-rods don’t fit, they are too small on the little end!” continued the Geordie.

Incredibly irritating, but not something I was surprised by I have to say. Getting back in touch with the people in France who made them was of little help, all of a sudden their English had totally collapsed to the completely unclear, this again didn’t surprise me given my experience of interviewing French Rallycross drivers who can speak perfect English when they want to chat, but when they don’t appear unable even to be able to say hello in anything other than their mother tongue.

The problem with the con-rods isn’t the end of the world. The bore of the small end is too big. We can counteract this by fitting a phosphor bronze sleeve to make up for small amount of difference there is between the con rod and the gudgen pin for the piston. Fortunately I am good friends with Gareth Graham, who restores Vintage and Edwardian racing cars, so he is on the case of making some phosphor bronze bushes to make the rods fit.

Obviously this is a problem, and will cost even more money. Although we are behind we are not yet so far behind that we can’t catch up again before the chance to go testing and racing… fingers crossed, touch wood, etc.

We are still waiting for the return of my gearbox from Gripper, I am promised it in the next few weeks so that will be holding us up once the engine is together later this week.

On a more positive, the boot floor of the car has now been adapted, thanks to the help of a retired panel beating friend, although the car is not currently at its prettiest, a distinct lack of panels doesn’t help its aesthetics, this isn’t crucial to having a trip to the rolling road or indeed to do a private test.

As I wrote last month, my fitness level is slowly improving, and more squash is being played by the week. The time has now been found to do this, so there really is no excuse not to although the aching the next day is a tedious side effect!

As anyone in my situation of trying to race above the level they can realistically compete in, there are sacrifices to make and pride has to often be put to one side in order to make steps forward. Begging, borrowing and stealing is the name of the game. Begging support from people; I am currently on the verge of securing some support from various people. These are not multi-thousand pound deals that will see me being paid to do the ERC, they are small things like having a sponsor for the lubricants used on the car throughout the year. This sort of thing would make a massive difference to my season. Borrowing; harder in many ways than begging. The situation around borrowing is that you normally know the person you are borrowing from in the first place and I really don’t like asking favours. Without people helping and allowing me to borrow things, however, none of the 2010 season would have happened! Stealing; the things that get stolen are ideas, how to adapt the car as cheaply as possible to improve it, be it looking at other Rallycross cars or other engineering innovations and looking at ways to improve the set-up as a whole, be it van, trailer, or awning.

I have secured the use of a race awning for this year. It was bought second hand by a friend and I have the use of it on the basis I repair the damage for it to be used by him in the British championship, an ideal situation.

On a final note of borrowing, I would like to thank a few friends who have made big offers for both the British and French rounds of the ERC 2011 which will not only allow me continue the dream and be racing in the 2011 European Rallycross Championship, but perhaps in some comfort. That would certainly be a nice change, one I’m sure my mechanics will approve of even more than myself.

There are 110 days to go, but it still feels like we have only just finished the 2010 season. I returned from India in mid-December to find some of the new parts had arrived, which was great. The last week or two has been a frustrating time though, as making progress over the Christmas and New Year is almost impossible when it comes to ordering things as everybody is on holiday.

The new con-rods for the engine have arrived, so apart from a few gaskets and seals the engine is ready to go back together. Hopefully this will be ready before the end of January.

The gearbox issues have been discovered by Gripper, and are being resolved. Within a month we should have the box back and ready to bolt onto the engine and into the car, at the same time we can be altering the boot floor and the exhaust.

The flanges and material have arrived for the inlet manifold so the new one can be made in readiness – barring any late issues – for a trip to the rolling road.

There are still lots of odds and sods to get for the car, but hopefully by the middle of February we will be able to start testing in time for the start of the season. That should leave us plenty of time to sort out any problems, assuming they don’t cost a fortune of course.

We have also started to look more into the 2011 calendar. Obviously I don’t have the money to do the whole season, but we would like to make a plan and try to stick to it, although that is harder than I first anticipated. Deciding which events to try and do is not easy. Lydden is a must, and France, Belgium and Holland are easy as they are ‘local’. Of the far away events, I can’t do Portugal due to work commitments in the British Championship, and Czech being all on its own at the end of the year isn’t too appealing, but depending on what the situation is at the time I could be persuaded…easily. I really, really, really want to race in Sweden, but the trip so far north to Norway would be both time consuming and expensive. Being in Scandinavia for over a week will just be expensive because of the exchange rate, never mind the amount of distance there is to cover. I also really want to do Poland, as I loved the track in 2010, but that is paired with Austria which I am not too fussed about for some reason. Also, the journey to Poland is epic in the van, as we found out in 2010 travelling non-stop for 38 hours to get there. The issue with the calendar is that there are events I want to do, but none of them are in pairs. In my position the best and really only way to do as many as possible is to do the events in pairs because you are not travelling all the way out to Europe twice. So a compromise will have to be met, and one of the long haul journeys will be dropped I fear.

The pleasing thing is that I have driven on half the circuits of next years championship, and visited three more of them, so I have prior knowledge of most of the venues of 2011 in some capacity.

We are working on some sponsors for this season, and the feeling I am getting from people is positive, so all will become more certain in the next few weeks I’m sure. Aside from that and the car there is another area I think there is massive scope for improvement for this year. That is my fitness. I don’t think I’m unfit, but certainly nowhere near as fit as I could or should be. I have never been one for spending hours in the gym, although I used to play a lot of squash and football, but you have to make time for these things, they don’t just happen. This spring I am going to make a concerted effort to make time for these to improve my fitness. A fitter body means driving the car isn’t so tiring, and your mind will stay more alert. Every tiny thing counts, if you have the best car in the world but are too wrecked to drive it then you are wasting your time.

The opposite side of that is my side, the car might not be the fastest in the field by any means but if I am physically and mentally as strong as I can be then you can get the most out of what you have available to you. This, coupled with making the effort to learn the circuits in more detail with the help of some ‘Supercar’ friends and it should be another little advantage we have over last season, and another small step in the direction of scoring those valuable ERC points!

145 Days. Sounds like a long time doesn’t it? This time last year, in the run towards the first round of the ERC, I thought that it was a long time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and as it turned out it wasn’t nearly enough time. This year we are in a much better position. For a start we don’t have half a car to build. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of work to do but it is directed in specific areas. I know we can still encounter a lot of problems, but hopefully we are doing things with enough time in hand to account for such issues.

Progress on the car is going quite well. I didn’t expect to have so many of the things that we want to improve on in place by this point. The new con-rods should be arriving any day now, so we have all the components for the engine. We have also got the parts required to make the new inlet manifold: a standard Renault inlet manifold which will be machined to be provide one flange (the cylinder head end), and a Ford Pinto DCOE manifold that will provide the flange for the throttle bodies. So it’s just a case of making the tubes to join up. I say ‘just’ but this is one of the trickiest jobs on the car due to the angles involved, but it is one that I am sure the ever resourceful Michael and Frankie Boak combination will be able to achieve with apparent ease. I suppose it is the difference between being a professional and not, but they make the hardest of jobs look very easy!

The other main part we are waiting for is the gearbox. Gripper has stripped it and found a couple of minor problems so they are redesigning some of the parts. Once this is sorted, and they have changed the gear ratios with a new crown wheel and pinion we will have the gearbox back, just after Christmas I hope.

Once we have the engine and gearbox back in the car we will re-visit the rolling road, and hopefully come away with more power. To aid this further we are going to take the spare wheel well out of the rear of the car as this will allow us to have the exhaust go straight through to the rear without any big bends. Hopefully the flow will be less effected, and give us a tiny bit more power (every one counts!).

The Super1600 2011 regulations have some brilliant news for me: the weight limit for the class has been raised from 950 to 1000kgs for 2011. I can assure you we were the heaviest car in the class last season, so with the addition of the new glassfibre tailgate and passenger door that are being made for me by Magnum Motorsport, we should be right on the weight limit. With many other cars having to put weight on to meet this limit we will have gained on everyone in the class by virtue of the regulations, so that will give us a massive help going into 2011 too!

As I write this I am in India, with a project based on a some English teaching and photography. Being here has made me realise how lucky we are in Europe to be as affluent as we are, and that we have the opportunities that we do, racing in Rallycross for instance. There are a few similarities between here and our sport though. The roads in India make even the roughest Rallycross track look like a billiard table. Coupled with that, there are next to no rules on the road. One driver said to me “We drive on the left hand side – some of the  time!”. On a road the size of a B road in the UK, I have seen two coaches side-by-side going in one direction, avoiding a truck, two motorbikes and an Auto-rickshaw going in the other direction. And it’s not just other road users you have to avoid. Cows, people and dogs also cause a hazard on the potholed roads. It’s like the chaos theory, somehow it just works. I think a lot of the drivers here would make great Rallycross drivers.

A quick mention for my two of my closest friends in Rallycross. My mechanic since I started Rallycross in 2005, Dave Tulett, made his own Rallycross debut at the Rallycross Superprix at the end of October. He borrowed a clubman modified Seat Ibiza, won his first heat race, and had a fantastic day. I told him before the event that once he had tried it that he would want more. I think he doubted me.

It’s a funny thing motor sport, he is now selling his road car to fund buying the car. So when he isn’t at the ERC with me in 2011 he will be racing in the BTRDA SuperModified Championship. The other person who I wanted to mention is Michael Boak, who also made a debut at the Superprix. Still using his trusty Audi TT, but now with a TDI motor – the first of its kind in the sport. You will be able to read more about this car in the press in the coming months but I know it will be doing very well sooner rather than later. The thing has enough torque to tow the entire workshop to events I would think!

Things are coming together nicely for 2011, hopefully we will be at round one of the championship having completed some testing. Stranger things have happened, but then again, they probably haven’t.