Halfway Through The Season

This year, my co-driver husband, Graham Morris, and I decided to compete on the Belgian International Rally Championship. We'd done the EARS/Motoring News National "Black Stuff" Championship for the last 3 years, winning the class once and coming second twice and we fancied a change this year.

We'd already competed in Belgium 3 times before and had thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but this was 4 years ago. Also, it only takes about 1½ hours from home to Folkestone, which is much less time than going over to Ireland, which is where we have been up to 3 times per year.

The Belgian International Rally Championship has 8 rounds:
February 13th/14th Boucles de Spa
March 28th Circuit des Ardennes
Apr 10th/11th Rallye des Hautes Fagnes
May 15th/16th Wallonie
Jun 26th-28th Ypres Westhoek Rally
Sep 12th/13th Tour of Flanders
Oct 2nd/3rd Lotto Bianche
Oct 23rd/24th Condroz

Due to business commitments, we knew that we couldn't do the first or the last rounds, but we are planning on competing on all the others.

We are now halfway through and we've certainly had an eventful time of it!

For all these events, we have to carry out pace noting prior to the event. When you do events in the UK and Ireland, you can actually buy pace notes and then you don't need to go over the stages as much to check them. This has advantages and disadvantages. With bought notes, you don't need as much time to do the recce, but the notes aren't always written the way that you would like or in a way that are valid for your car. For example, something which is cautioned as a bad jump in someone else's notes, may not actually be a jump at all in the Metro as we will be approaching it at a lower speed.

"In Belgium you can't usually buy pace notes..."

In Belgium, except for maybe Ypres and Flanders, you can't buy pace notes so to do the pace-noting, we usually have to go over the weekend before and then spend the whole weekend going over the stages as many times as possible. We aim to cover each stage at least 3 times - any less than that and you really can't trust the pace notes on the event. We would like to go over each stage more times, but the International events over there are so long (around 190 stage miles each which compares with this years' RAC rally at 240 stage miles) that we are really pushed to do each stage 3 times. Also, the actual time allowed for the recce is strictly limited.

There have been some problems with rallying in Belgium and quite a lot of restrictions have been brought in this year, which has changed the nature of some events. The Greens are starting to make their presence felt, although many people still support rallying due to the financial rewards each rally brings to its location. In Germany, there are very few rallies any more as the minority Greens have practically killed off the sport there.

Circuit of Ardennes

For our first event, The Circuit of Ardennes, we went over the weekend before and had a fairly uneventful recce. I then dropped Graham at Namur station and he caught the Eurostar home from Brussels and I continued on to Germany for a business trip. Graham returned on the following Friday in time for scrutineering.

This was a 1 day event starting early on the Saturday and finishing up in the early hours of the Sunday, but still packed in 190 stage miles, which is longer than many 2 day events.

From very early on in the event, I was complaining that the car seemed down on power, but we decided to continue for as long as possible. However, shortly before the end of the 12th stage (exactly half way through), smoke started pouring out of the back and we just managed to crawl over the flying finish line before we ground to a halt.

The hydraulic lifters had gone causing terminal damage to all sorts of bits in the engine. This was our first ever engine failure in 7 years, so we haven't done too badly. This meant a race against time to get another engine before the next round, which was only 2 weeks later.

"There was a 4 star hotel about 100 yards from where we stopped..."

The only good thing was that there was a 4 star hotel about 100 yards from where we stopped so we could go and prop up the bar whilst waiting for the crew to come and rescue us.

Normally when you break down on a rally, you are miles from any civilisation! A bonus was the March sunshine, which made the early exit a bit more bearable.

Hautes Fagnes

For the next event, Hautes Fagnes, I had the ideal preparation - I had to go to the USA in the week prior to the rally and I couldn't do the recce. I got back to Heathrow at 7.35 on the Thursday morning, went home, unpacked, did the washing, packed again and drove to Folkestone to get the 3 pm shuttle! We bought pace notes from the only other British crew doing the rally and received special dispensation to go through the notes once on the Friday.

The rally started uneventfully enough and we were looking forward to the 18 stages. However, quite early on, I mentioned that the clutch was playing up and it got worse and worse. The crew kept on making adjustments but at the re-group prior to the final 3 stages, it practically gave up totally. This made the last 3 stages very interesting! For the last stage, I could only find 2nd gear and we had to use the ignition to get going at all. There were 5 hairpins with hand-brake turns to contemplate on the last stage. In Belgium, you always have to go over the podium at the end of each leg and we had to clear away all the spectators to take a running leap at the podium.

We finally made it to the end with a good result, second in class and 39th overall. The weather for the event was very wet. The combination of this and several gravel link sections (some of these had streams running down them), made the event very challenging - much more like a gravel event than a tarmac event. Maybe a bit like some of the stages on the London International rally.

Wallonie

We've just done the third round in the series, Wallonie, based in Namur. This was a 2 day event with the first leg on the Friday night and the bulk of the rally on the Saturday. Again, I had ideal preparation with a business trip getting in the way. We did the recce the weekend before and then Graham dropped me off at Brussels airport and I flew to Stockholm for a few days. He then picked me up on the way back to Namur on the Thursday. I happened to be in Stockholm when Chelsea were playing Stuttgart in the Cup Final. It was very interesting with 12,000 Chelsea fans there. Thank goodness they won - at least they were happily drunk rather than unhappily!

The first stage was around the 14th century citadel....

"The first stage was fascinating - it was all around the 14th century citadel and castle and was mostly over cobbles - just as well it wasn't raining! In fact we had dry weather for the whole event, and sunshine for much of the event, which is very unusual in Belgium. With a new clutch, we thought that everything would be OK. However, it started slipping almost from the start. On Belgian events, the timing is so tight that we didn't have the chance to replace the clutch cable until the end of stage 9, which was on the second day. "

Once that was fixed, we really enjoyed the stages until stage 18 when we suffered total suspension collapse all along the right side. This made for very interesting handling for the next 2 stages until we could get to service at the end of the leg and fortunately, we had another hydrogas unit and the time to fix it. The crew of Dave Gough and Nick Bray did a great job in replacing the unit in around 15 minutes so we didn't lose any time.

We had a cracking result with second in class again and 35th overall - our best overall result on an international rally. We are now leading the N1 class in the Championship at the halfway stage.

Our impressions so far

These are cracking events and very hard on both woman and machine. All the rounds are far longer than most of the British Rally Championship events and they are really condensed with as much stage mileage as possible and as little road mileage as they can manage.

There is not much service time at all so you need a lot of luck to finish events. The standard is very high and the organisation is superb - you often see the same marshals, event after event.

One of my biggest gripes over here is that, running in a small car at the back of the field; you don't see any results at all during the event. With a Passage Control at the end of each stage, you get an up to date set of results at the end of each leg, which is great. However, we have found it impossible to get any photographs this year, which is very frustrating.

We are thoroughly looking forward to the next round, the Ypres Westhoek Rally, which we have done once before, when it was the 24 hours of Ypres. This is a long 3 day event, which the organisers are trying to get into the World Rally Championship - roll on the end of June!