Conventional wisdom says that rallying is a rich man’s sport. A competitive run on a world championship event is going to cost a wedge of cash, but of course that’s not the full story. Every weekend there are club competitors out there having fun for a more modest outlay. Rallying can indeed be a rich man’s sport, but the rest of us can still find a way. I’ve been competing at the low budget end of rallying for many years and hundreds of events have passed beneath my wheels. I’ve done things in cars that no sensible person would attempt but given the plethora of clubman events and disciplines available I never bothered having my car made eligible for stage rallying. There were broadly two reasons for this; firstly I was having too much fun doing other things, and secondly the stage events on offer didn’t appeal. It probably helps to understand a bit about rallying in the UK at this point.
Rallying is quite a broad church and stage rallying is just one branch. UK legislation allows for a regulated form of the sport to take place on public roads during the hours of darkness and there is a healthy daylight scene based around Regularity events. Both forms often use private land for sections with “impossible” bogey times where drivers can really let loose away from the restrictions of the Road Traffic Act, and the category known as Targa rallying runs exclusively over private land tests with manoeuvres to keep the average speed down. With good organisation the average speed can be set quite low but still require extremely spirited driving to achieve it. Until a couple of years ago, UK stage rallies broadly consisted of single venue events, usually at disused airfields or racing circuits, and multi venue rallies using Forestry Commission tracks. The costs, particularly of the latter, have risen quite considerably over time and proportionally speaking you can derive more smiles per mile from Road, Targa and Regularity events. There were cheaper ways to get your kicks than stage rallying, particularly if forestry was out of reach and your aspirations extended further than single venues.
However, in 2018, an important development came to fruition. For the first time legislation allowed closed road tarmac rallies to be held in England and Wales. Closed road events were already permitted in Scotland and Northern Ireland although Scottish rallying had been temporarily on hold. The Isle of Man is of course outside the UK. The chance to access affordable closed road rallies here on the mainland caught the interest of many people, including me. Such events promised to combine multi venue interest but without the high costs levied for the use of gravel roads. The only snag was that the competitor licencing requirements were set higher than expected for the first such event, the 2018 Corbeau Seats Clacton & Tendring Rally, and this set the template for other events. My licence already had stage entitlement to National B level, but closed roads required being eligible for the higher National A qualification. To upgrade meant having to complete four National B stage events, with no other rallies of National B level such as Road, Targa or Regularity to count. The car was fully legal but it seems I wasn’t. I needed to get my act together for future events and being an absolute tightwad, doing this as cheaply as possible was integral to my plan.
Regular readers (assuming such people exist) will know about my well-used BMW 318Ti Compact. It’s not particularly quick but Compacts are hardy things and work acceptably well in virtually standard form. For motorsport on the cheap it is my weapon of choice, in the same way that a slightly blunt butter knife is still technically a weapon. However, having upgraded the car to stage specification, my debut was immediately postponed. A mishap on a road event Wales saw the radiator break free of its moorings whilst attacking a farm track at ambitious speed, kinking a coolant hose and cooking the engine. Getting home involved waiting until dawn, a long walk, a 30 minute taxi to the nearest town and 100 miles of train ride. A week later I returned to where I’d abandoned the car with a borrowed beavertail. It’s rare I can’t coax a car home but I’d done a proper job on the cylinder head. By the time I’d noticed the temperature gauge was high I took the decision to keep pressing on as it was likely to be damaged anyway so there was no real point in slowing down…
With repairs completed by JWS Developments of Chesterfield, we were back in action by July. I’m lucky that my navigator is the highly experienced Cath Woodman so at least one of us knew what we were doing. We entered Mid-Derbyshire Motor Club’s Core Driver Training Twyford Stages, a venue we both know well. Given our exploits and successes in other disciplines, you may think we were about to make a big impression on the world of stage rallies but I should manage your expectations here. Being successful in a 150bhp car when most other people have similar machinery is perfectly feasible. Stepping in a pool where even a modest 1400cc has 150bhp is a different matter and our direct competitors in class generally boasted between 200 and 300bhp. In the strange world of single venue rallying a crew will tune their car to a state of temperamental potency, fit sticky tyres costing £175 a corner, go and do a five mile stage, then return to their fully equipped service crew who will proceed to take the entire car to bits before repeating the whole pantomime. I come from a world of £20 part worn remould forestry tyres, driving 100 miles to an event, having a 150 mile thrash and a good result and driving home again. Our service kit for stage rallies consists of two tarps and some hand tools lobbed in the back of my old pickup truck. We don’t have a trailer or helpers. With paintwork free of sponsor stickers, we are notably low budget.
Spending as little as possible doesn’t mean missing out, and it doesn’t mean coming last. Twyford is an abandoned USAF airfield that has been partially repopulated by trees and varies between wide runways, gravel and slippery concrete roads. We had great fun wearing out the remoulds with plenty of drifts and kept it nailed down the rough sections. The Compact may be arguably overbuilt for tarmac but a 50% retirement rate proved that to be no bad thing. We pushed hard and finished in 23rd place, ahead of people who should have left us standing. Finishing 23rd on a road rally would have me gloomy for a month but here it felt like a measure of success, especially as we drove home with zero defects. Most importantly I also came away with one of the four signatures required for my National A upgrade. Those tempting closed roads were a step closer.
The one puddle….
Our second event came a mere three weeks later at the Phoenix Stages. The Lincolnshire badlands lack any vegetation taller than 6 inches and we battled with the wind to lay the tarps down in a manner resembling slapstick parachute practice. The rally runs on the surviving but degraded perimeter tracks of the former RAF Fulbeck. It’s certainly possible to commit but the fast and rough surface can take its toll. The potholes were enough to egg one of our indestructible tyres and tweak the steering off centre, but we got off lightly compared to our neighbours who completely destroyed two expensive Grp4 Escort wheels. The repeated punishment caught up however and by mid-afternoon the battery tray had broken free from the inner wing and the bonnet had sawn its way through a securing pin. Extensive use of structural grade cable ties and gorilla tape ensured no time was lost but disaster nearly struck in the afternoon. We rounded a blind bend flat in third gear to find a Ford KA stopped amidst a demolished chicane with the driver sprinting across the road, debris strewn across my committed line. The wonders of the hydraulic handbrake saw us make a significant adjustment to thread one side of the stranded KA whilst the car behind fishtailed around the opposite side. Cath calmly reminded me mid-slide not to get a puncture by putting a wheel off the road, which was a useful clarification. Having survived that, the diff threw a tooth half a mile from the final control but that was insufficiently serious to slow us down. We finished 7th in class and 24th overall from 44 survivors. Given our horsepower deficit in the highly contested two-litre class, I was pretty happy with that and we drove it home again.
I’m most comfortable on narrow lanes, so our third choice of event was not an obvious one. Having once been a forestry event, the Rainworth Skoda Dukeries Rally now runs exclusively within Donington Park circuit. I didn’t have any suitable racing tyres in stock so I took a chance on some low profile Toyo TR1s, electing to disregard the old adages of “buy cheap, buy twice” and “tyres are cheaper than bodywork”. I figured that unless it hosed down with rain we’d be broadly ok… Obviously, you can predict what happened with the weather. It was immediately apparent that our respectable mid field result from Fulbeck wouldn’t be replicated as half the entry consisted of low-slung tarmac racers. After mulling over the news that any damage to turf would be expensively charged for by the circuit operators, I considered that a slippery Donington would be no place for unnecessary heroics and that getting a finish was our main objective.
We were dramatically out-horsepowered but the Toyos were marginally more effective than I expected. Unsticking the rear end to showboat at the hairpins was a bit too easy but the few seconds lost in entertainingly lurid drifts made little difference to our overall result. In hindsight I could have pushed harder and Cath commented I was clearly far more at home on the short gravel section than the expanses of tarmac. I have never made any claim to be a natural racing driver! Our overall result was hardly a dear diary moment but the car remained in one piece, we weren’t anywhere near last and we avoided the ignominy of the gravel traps. We also got featured on the Special Stage TV coverage of the event which is broadcast on digital television and youtube. We crop up at 6:35 looking almost competent, but it’s worth a watch in general.
Having made a mental note to stay off the racing circuits we entered another airfield single venue scheduled for December, but then the 2020 licence renewal documentation landed. The licence requirements to qualify for closed road events had changed. Instead of having to complete four events I now needed to complete six, but all my previous experience would now be taken into account. I had therefore already completed the required number of single venue stage rallies. Glory be. This is probably the only time a change in regulation has ever been of benefit. Stage rallying on a strict budget is still very much possible. I intend to borrow a trailer for longer distances but you won’t find us with fancy gear and stacks of new rubber anytime soon; the budget just isn’t there and any additional funds I do come across will go into buying additional horsepower. With the necessary licence now within my grasp, 2020 promises some new adventures. I’ll be back to update you if anything interesting happens.
The lure of open roads…
Photo credits: Songasport, Kevin Money, David Yorke