There were three events remaining and with us missing the club’s own Spotted Dick and Custard Stages at Longcross and the Millbrook National from earlier in the year, all our scores would count, where as other crews would be dropping their worst two results.
With calculators at the ready it was back to Avon Park for Bournemouth and District CC’s Wessex Rope and Packaging Stages.
The pre-event entry list contained and amazing six 7Oaks crews, but they would all suffer from very mixed fortunes, with two non starters including Colin Billings, whose mechanical gremlin is doing a taste test on every part of his car this year! Marc Noaro and Jon Harmer had swapped seats again in their 205 Gti, but had a string of very slow stage times, then picked up the pace on Stage 5, but then retired.
Martin Hanlon and Stuart Abbott in their Sunbeam 1600 made it to the finish as last car at 64th overall, but fairing much better was the 309 GTi crew of Colin and Richard Knott who put in some nice consistent times to finish 33rd and 9th in the “up to” 2 litre battlefield.
In our class we had a couple of rapid, but non championship Novas as well as the usual hoard of 106 Rallyes, one of which had engaged in some pre-event testing at the venue and had seriously upped their pace, but the Banzi driving style they’d adopted meant they would be two seconds slower than us on the first stage, yet 17 seconds slower on the fifth stage, as they tended to bounce in and out of the bushes a lot!
Due to the compact nature of the venue you quite often catch up other cars at the split and merge junctions, and we managed to overtake two of the 106s in our class, one having a bit of a scare as we passed him over the flying finish line without him seeing us coming!
With no retirements
in our class we were 3rd at the end of the rally (41st overall) but 1st
championship contender for those all-important points. After some number
crunching, we had worked out that we needed to score a minimum of two points
on the next event to keep the class lead, yet not do the last round on
Jersey on cost grounds. We had to finish at all costs!
So here we go then, at the Solent Stages run by the Royal Navy MSA over the Bovington Tank training ranges. This event was on the same day as the club’s North Weald sprint so you know what the weather was like – blowing a gale and lashing it down!
There were cars parked in all sorts of strange places on the first few stages, with a Nova from our class rolling out through a very fast dip, and a Stratos replica that must have aquaplaned and spun at a point on one straight where we were doing just under 100mph! The worst the conditions got, the more we enjoyed it, being fastest in class on every stage to take the class win from the 106 opposition by 1 minute 44 seconds (26th overall). This result meant we could not be beaten in the championship class, and depending on the Jersey rally result we might be 2nd or 3rd overall in the Rally 2002 Tarmac Championship.
This was a great end to a very good season that had seen us drive to and from every event, consume 12 tyres, 3 sets of brake pads, 2 litres of brake fluid, a couple of oil changes, 2 brake disks, 4 dampers and not put a scratch on the car all year! Top rally action for minimal expenditure – can’t be bad.