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Rally of Great Britain
The newly named Rally of Great Britain, formerly Wales Rally GB took place on the 22-25th October. Starting in Cardiff, the rally offered 16 stages in the Welsh forests, with wind, rain and very slippery conditions on some stages making driving conditions tough.
This year, Ludlow Castle Motor Club had one of its members competing, Andrew ‘Maps’ Sankey, who was co-driving for Icelandic rally champion Daniel Sigourdarson in a Mitsubishi EVO 10.
Sankey is a regular co-driver for Sigourdarson and the pairing work well together in what has been a very reliable car, up until this rally.
The pairing had a very eventful 3 days of rallying. On Stage 1 (SS1) they got off to a good start finishing 27th fastest, passing the car in front half way through the stage. After another good time on SS2 finishing 21st quickest, they started to get a few problems on the 3rd Stage. They caught the car in front again, but this time they couldn’t get past and flying stones from that car smashed Sigourdarson’s windscreen. Also, the power steering failed making it very hard to steer the car. On Stage 4 the exhaust broke and Sigourdarson/Sankey were overcome with fumes, which made them too ill to compete. They missed the last stage of the day, but under Super Rally rules they were allowed to continue the next day, albeit with time penalties for missing the last stage.
Day 2 started off well, they had a good SS7 and pushed harder on SS8, but on SS9 had brake failure half way through Half Way forest. This was fixed in service. On SS10 Sigourdarson hit a boulder and bent both front and rear tracking which caused handling problems.
These were long stages with no service in between, so the pair had to carry out repairs themselves. They made it to SS11, but on the road section to SS12 the steering broke, again they were unable to carry on incurring another 10 minute penalty for starting day 3.
Things were going from bad to worse, routine checks were carried out on the car in the morning and the active diffs were found to have failed, so the car had to be driven in standard road mode all day.
It was now just a case of drive to finish, which they did. In spite of all the problems they had on a rally the pair would probably like to forget, they finished a commendable 40th overall out of a total of 50 finishers. If they had a trouble free rally their competitive times proved that they would have finished in the top 20.
The winner of the rally was Sebastian Loeb in a Citroen c4 World Rally Car. This gave him his 6th World Rally Champion title, after a lot of pressure this year from Mikko Hirvonen (Ford Focus WRC).
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