Thanks guys, had a great weekend and it was good to catch up with Trav and Nick again (sorry for not being able to stop and chat for as long as I would have liked but these events seem to have you rushing to meet the next checkpoint in time).
A massive thanks to George and his lovely wife for spending the weekend with us and keeping the Evo in tip top shape which allowed us to finish the event without any car problems whatsoever.
My car has been subjected to a lot of changes over the past 6 months, diffs, suspension etc all of which transformed it into a very serious tarmac weapon that I was only just beging to get a feel for towards day 2.
As George mentioned...we destroyed a brand new set of Dunlop 03G's in the 2 day event, the last 3 stages were run with the shoulders on all 4 tyres delaminated and minimal tread depth across the tyres, the car seemed to step the rear a little more but still held off on understeer which is attributed to the new front diff that the car now has.
Sunday was our day to shine and we pushed as hard as we felt comfortable, averaging 6th position for all the stages we competed in, on the 3rd stage we came across a BMW M3 that had come into a corner too hot and left the road straight into a tree, as we were first on the scene we had to remain until the ambulance arrived, fortunately the occupants were ok (which says a huge amount for well constructed cages as this hit was so large that I was initially too scared to look in the car as I thought the driver would have certainly been dead). As there was a number of large offs on this particular stage it took 45 minutes for the medical team to arrive, making us miss the next 2 stages :angry: In this situation a derived time is awarded to competitors who miss stages due to such as the above circumstances, this time is supposed to be calculated on you pre stage performance and should reflect the time you would have placed for the stage, our incar footage up to stopping at the incident had us at a time that would have yielded a 5th or 6th position finish, the derived time they gave us actually awarded us with a 10th place finish, although we protested and took our video evidence to be checked (which they did not want to see) the officials were steadfast with the ruling.
Massively stoked with finishing 9th in Early modern although 6th or 7th would have been better if we were not dudded with the derived time! We were just glad the guys in the beemer were ok and if the situation arises again we will stop without hesitation, just next time I will argue our case a little more!
The course was amazing and had a bit of everything, plenty of twisties and some serious high speed sections- on Saturday afternoon on the Hathill stage we recorded a top speed of 230kph and this was in a section of road that had 3 right an 2 left handed corners thrown in the mix to negotiate while the car was in 5th gear with all the red lights on the shiftlight aglow :lol:
Road surfaces were also very good in terms of being smooth compared to Tassie although the surface was very abrasive, which we believed was a part of the reason for destroying the tyres.
We will be back next year!
Will post a few pics and vids once I can get motivated to upload them