New house, (nearly) new car, new navigator...
We
moved house just after the Cilwendeg, up-market to a two-car garage… with a 3-bed
semi-detached joined on. Only just in
time too, as very soon afterwards I acquired one of the very last genuine Ford
Mk II Mexico / RS2000 bodyshells, finished in primer, at the huge cost (in
1983) of £1,150. (I can’t remember
whether the VAT was included or extra.)
The
rally car was left outside while Peter Croft and I got to work on the
shell. It didn’t really matter that I
wasn’t any good at welding, because Peter was (and probably still is) a welding
artist. Every run is the same size as
the last one and a beauty to behold. We
had the official Ford Escort rally preparation book and we did the full works. Additional seam welding, gussets, rear damper
turrets, fully fitted roll cage… we even removed the standard tunnel and
replaced it with the one for the automatic Escort (with a few modifications to
the gearbox, this enables the box to be removed without taking the engine out).
We
spent at least three weeks, every night, working on that shell before it went
off to Copy Nook Garage to be painted.
Bright red on the outside, black interior, and white inside the bonnet
and boot for maximum visibility in the dark.
Then back home and just before swapping everything over, I thought I
should treat the underside to a Waxoyl finish.
I’d only just started spraying when I started feeling high: luckily, Val was at home so I went and found
her and asked her to keep an eye on me in case I did some drug-crazed
damage. Not having taken any drugs
before in my life (apart from alcohol… oh, and nicotine, but I gave up smoking
when I was 14) I wasn’t sure what might happen next. I survived intact.
After
that, it was a case of swapping everything over. Over the previous couple of
years, I’d got to know Gordon Birtwistle. Gordon was – and still is, well over a decade
after he could have retired – the ‘go-to’ man for rally car suspensions. We must have hit it off alright because
Gordon seemed quite happy to come over frequently to make sure everything was ok. He had a great approach to his job – he would
always say “Your brain can only cope with so much at once. If half of its energy is spent on keeping the
damn car on the road, then there’s only the other half left to sort out all the
important stuff – like “where’s the
road going next?” and "can I push it just a little
bit more?" So for goodness sake, get the
car handling right. If you’re doing 70
mph on the motorway you should be able to take your hands off the steering
wheel and let it carry on in a straight line”.
Gordon had seen cars that needed 80% of brain power just to keep them on
the straight and narrow.
That
reminds me of something I forgot to mention earlier. I bought the car from Ian Parrington in late
81 or early 82, won at least two rallies and scored a reasonable number of
points in the MN championship, mainly in the first nine months of 1983. Between the Bolton Midnight and Mull, I took
it up to Copy Nook Garage, the garage at Bolton-by-Bowland that Ian and his
father ran. We decided we should
completely remove the front suspension and check everything over. Gordon was there when we were doing it. “Hang on a moment chaps,” he said, “Let’s
take another look at those Bilstein struts…”
And then he laughed, one of those long, deep, from-the-belly
laughs. “How long have you been running
this set-up?” he asked. “All the time I’ve had the car,” I replied, “Why?” “Well,” said Gordon, “You’ve got a tarmac spec
strut on one side… and a forest strut on the other!” I would never make a test driver!! (We had tarmac struts on both sides after
that.)
Back
to the re-shell project… I think everything swapped over without too much
trouble. I didn’t save as much weight as
I could have done – I kept the steel doors and proper glass (although bonnet
and boot were fibreglass), and I even managed to find a buyer for the old
shell. By February or so, the car was
finished.
It
looked mint. And it drove really well
too. I couldn’t wait to get back out
into the lanes with it.
But
John couldn’t commit to another season’s rallying. He was getting more responsibility at work, and had committed to do the Astra Challenge with John Morton, so didn’t feel like he could commit to the time required to be really
competitive.
Mike
Kidd was on the look out for a handy partnership, and we’d chatted a few times,
so although he lived near Cambridge, we felt we got on together well enough to
make a good team. So in March we did our
first event together, if not the first then one of the first MN rounds of ’84 –
the Agbo. Mike was, of course, not
John. The biggest difference was he was never quiet. If the road was straight for one mile then
Mike would keep on saying, for the whole mile, “It’s straight, it’s straight,
dead straight, straight, dead straight…”
And he knew the Welsh roads pretty well.
In fact very well. So well in
fact that just after the petrol halt we came on to a straight and Mike said “There
are two crests which are flat, then immediately after the third crest the road
goes square left.” The first crest
appeared and Mike shouted “Keep it flat, it’s straight!” Over we went, and kept
going to the second crest, and again “Keep it flat, this one’s straight too!”
and over we went… the road went square left, and we sailed into the trees. How we missed them all I’ve no idea, but when
the car stopped both doors were so close to tree trunks that we couldn’t open
either of them!
Mike
was beside himself with remorse. He was
feeling so guilty, I was embarrassed.
These things happen (and the car was undamaged – amazingly!) But it took us a long time to extricate it,
so we effectively retired on the spot.
On the way home Mike suggested that we hadn’t had time to get used to
each other, and perhaps we should do an event on my patch next, as a
familiarisation exercise. We chose Springhill
Car Club’s Ribble Rally in April. The
entry list was pretty competitive and much of the route was quite familiar to
me.
After
Gisburn Forest and a series of tests in North Lancs, we seemed to be just
shaving the lead from Ken Skidmore and Kevin Savage, then over Barbondale
(quickest) to Dent before the mighty Kingsdale.
I love Kingsdale (actually Dentdale and Kingsdale, from Dent to
Ingleton). Pace notes were still legal at that time, and on some events – those with long, relatively junction-free sections (many of the Yorkshire Dales roads especially) – you had to have them to stand a chance of winning. I told Mike I'd brought pace notes
for this road and was a bit taken aback when he told me he didn’t do notes,
didn’t believe in notes, and every bend would be on the 1:25,000 map that he
had. “Oh no it won’t” I replied, but he
wouldn’t be swayed. The notes stayed in
the back of the car and as we set off from the selective start, Mike read the
road from his map.
Once
you get to the summit, there’s a cracking section where the car is pitched into
the air a few times, but at an angle to the road (not sideways, not pitch –
perhaps a sailor would call it yaw, where the right hand side of the car lands first, and vice-versa) but when you get it right, it’s
awesome. When you get it wrong you crash… and then the section from Kingsdale Head is
just sooo fast!
Anyway,
we arrived at the finish about sixth or seventh on the road, to find that the
marshal is showing everyone’s times on a blackboard. We are fastest. Mike turns to me and says “There you are, I
told you the map was as good as any pace notes” to which I replied, truthfully, “Mike, I
haven’t listened to a word you’ve said since the start!”. Mike went on to coach rally crews on the use
of pace notes on events like the Mull Rally…
We
finished first overall and felt like now we were a team. Two weeks later Mike travelled up from
Cambridge again, this time for the next Motoring News round, the Colman Tyres,
starting from Ilkley. We had a ‘steady’ run,
finishing a slightly disappointing 11th o/a – but it was a strong
field, and only 2 minutes separated the six cars from 5th to 11th. Ron Beecroft and John Millington were the
victors, with Pattison, Moran and Gwyndaf Evans in the top five. Ken Skidmore (10th) beat us by one
second! We would have to go quicker still.
Onwards
to the ’84 MN Championship… or so we thought.
Fate has a funny way of moving the goalposts quicker than a well-sorted
car over Kingsdale though…
No comments:
Post a Comment