Rallying on the Wrong Side
By David Watson

It started as a chance remark……………

My Stratos has been off the road this year because I am fitting a V6 in place of the Volumex, in a bid to gain more reliability and performance for my rallying, and Gary Lomas has been very good in providing advice and encouragement during the process. As he has built two V6-engined Litton Corse, and uses them for rallying, he is a very useful mentor.

Most of Gary's rallying takes place in France where he uses his French rallying friends as navigator. We were talking by phone one evening, and he mentioned that he would like to do some UK rallies, but he did not have a UK co-driver. Before my brain could stop it, my mouth was suggesting that I could help him out while my car was off the road!!

A couple of weeks later, Gary phoned and said, "What are you doing on August 5th? There's a rally that we can do".

In no time at all, the day of the rally was here. Georgina and I were to meet Gary at the venue, so we were up at about 4am to drive down to Keevil Airfield, not far from Castle Combe race circuit. We arrived there just after 7am and were soon joined by Gary in the Stratos, and Julian in a Metro complete with spare wheels and tyres. Mick, one of Gary's friends and sometimes service crew, was also competing in the event in a Peugeot 205.

After a long wait in the queue of cars at scrutineering, we eventually got signed on, and then had to change the Stratos onto its slicks ready for the start of the rally. We were just getting ready to leave for the first stage, when we found out that Mick's Peugeot had failed scrutineering because of a seized engine cutoff switch, and so they would be just watching the rally and would help us with servicing.

Looking around the service area before the start, there was quite a lot of high class cars taking part, Metro 6R4s, Darrians, Sierra Costworths, etc. Neither Gary nor I had ever been to Keevil before, so we did not know what to expect. AND as I had not navigated on a rally for over 15 years, we decided that we'd just take it quite easy to start with!!.

Well, I managed to get us clocked into the arrival control at the right time for the first stage. Pulling away from the start line, I immediately realised that there's a world of difference between a Stratos with a Volumex engine, and a Stratos with a V6.

This was a very fast stage, making use of the runways, with 90s and hairpins constructed to slow us back down. At one point there was a flat out left which Gary took on the rev-limiter in 5th gear, and it was followed shortly after by a 90, hairpin, 90 combination that really tested the brakes.

I called the first few corners OK - but after that my navigating went a bit downhill, because I kept getting my left and right mixed up!!! Never mind, Gary coped OK - to be honest I think he just ignored me.

Later in the stage, there was a very tight and narrow section that was a combination of 90 degree bends separated by very short straights. In the Stratos, these came up so quickly, I couldn't read them off the stage map quickly enough. At another point, the stage map showed the road as straight, but it actually went 45 right, 45 left, 90 right, 90 left - fortunately Gary converted my call of "straight" into the correct route around the corners.

About 2 /3rds of the way round, we caught up to the car which had started 30 seconds in front of us, a 2litre Escort. Thankfully this occurred at one of the hairpins, and we were able to overtake him on the straight immediately after so we didn't lose much time, and continued on to finish the first stage without any further drama.

As we pulled into the Service Area, I apologised to Gary about my left and right mix-ups, and we had a little chat about how we could do things better on the next stage, and how Gary would prefer me to tell him about the corners.

Stage two was a duplicate of stage one, and this went much better for me. I started getting to grips with calling the corners correctly. Gary was still driving very well, and again we caught a car in the stage. Unfortunately this time it happened in the narrow twisty section, where it was impossible to overtake, so we dropped a bit of time.

At the end of stage 2, I went to check the stage times and found we were lying in 21st position overall out of 70 starters. Gary's target before the start had been to get ourselves into the top 25 by the finish, so we were doing even better than we had hoped.

Stage 3 was a new route, although the first part was the same, and after about 8 corners, just where the first change occurred, I got mixed up again and called "90 right into hairpin left". I was looking down at the stage map as we went around the 90, and I recalled the "Hairpin left", which was greeted with a loud shout of "WHAT?" from Gary through the intercom.

Looking up, I saw the hairpin was blocked with cones. Before I could gather myself and find where I went wrong, Gary saw that we had to go straight, and accelerated away. I quickly re-found my position on the stage map, realised my error, and started calling the correct corners. Fortunately, I didn't make any more errors on this stage, but that was a big mistake by me that had cost us quite a bit of time. It's often said that a co-driver cannot win a rally, but he can easily lose one!! - guess I know that one now!

Stage 4 was a repeat of stage 3, and I managed to get it right, and Gary drove well. The car was running perfectly. It was a pleasure not to have to spend the service time working on the car - I wish it had been like this for me last season!!!

Stage 5 was another different route, but this time I coped with the changes quite well. Coming into the gravel covered section, Gary was going a bit faster than normal through a 90 left and the Stratos went a bit more sideways on the exit. A fast 90 left followed immediately, and Gary couldn't quite get the car round it. All I saw was this massive hay bale looming up on my side (always the navigator's side isn't it!!). BANG, we hit it with a massive thump. The hay bale jumped right up in the air and flew about 30 feet before it came back down to earth.

Gary kept the car running, and quickly slotted it back into gear, and off we went. I asked Gary was he OK. He just nodded and kept quiet. Because of the slope of the bonnet I couldn't see how much damage there was, but, the impact was so big, I imagined that we must have done quite a bit of damage. I was almost crying thinking about what we had done to Gary's beautiful car.

As we went around the stage, I kept reminding Gary to look at the temperature gauge. At first it seemed OK, but then the gauge started zooming up. I told Gary to stop if it got too bad so that we would not damage the engine, and started calling out the number of corners left to the stage finish. We just made it to the finish with the temperature almost off the scale. I jumped out at the finish control to get the time card sorted so that Gary could continue straight into the service area without any delay.

When I walked up to the Stratos in the service area, it didn't look as badly damaged as I had anticipated - a few splits in the front bonnet section, and a bent bonnet clip. BUT the real problem was the radiator. We shoved a load of Radweld in, but the radiator continued leaking. Not having a spare radiator with us, we started thinking we were going to have to retire. A sickening thought!

Mick looked at where the leak was and suggested that if we took off the grille, we might be able to crimp up the split, and continue with only a minor water leak. After a few minutes trying this, it was obvious it wasn't going to work, so the whole front had to come off, so that we could see what was going on.

Fortunately Gary has his front wiring loom set up so that the whole front end can easily be removed (a modification, I now intend to apply to my car) and so we quickly removed the front. Once that was done, we could see that there was a split right on one edge of the radiator.

A crew just along from us had welding gear, so we quickly borrowed this, and Gary set about brazing up the radiator. Once this was done, in record time, we poured in some more water and were relieved to see that the leak was cured. By this time, we were almost reaching the end of our penalty free time, so we had to rapidly refit the front, without the wires for now, and shot off to the start of the next stage.

There was a long queue of cars waiting at the stage start, but I told Gary just to drive straight past them and barge his way in, so we wouldn't be late. According to the time, I was given at the arrival control, we should have incurred a 1 minute 40 second penalty, which was going to drop us down the order quite a way.

We spent all of stage 6 worrying about the water situation, but Gary's welding held up beautifully and we set a good time on stage 6. As I checked our times at the end of stage 6 we were up to 18th overall, but with the threat of a penalty hanging over our heads.

Stages 7 and 8 passed without incident, but, during servicing after stage 8, we noticed that both rear slicks were through to the canvas, and one of the front slicks was also just about gone. As we only had 2 spare slicks, and it looked like we needed 3, Gary decided we should refit the road tyres, and we'd just take it steady over the last 2 stages.

As we started stage 9, Gary commented that there was a lot less grip from the road tyres compared to the slicks, and the stage time bore this out - we dropped over 20 seconds on that one stage alone. Still there was only one stage to go, so we should get to the finish OK, and we were lying 13th overall. There was a 4.5 litre V8-engined Darrian in 14th overall. He had a problem earlier in the day, which had dropped him back a long way, but he was taking 20 seconds a stage out of us regardless of tyres, so we just had to accept that he was going to take 13th away from us by the end.

Gary drove the 10th and final stage as best he could on the road tyres, and even managed to claw back some of the time, but not enough to keep the Darrian behind us. Still one of the other front runners retired on the final stage, so we ended up 13th overall out of 70 starters - a very impressive result, and a testament both to Gary's driving and his car preparation skills.

I had a fantastically enjoyable day, even though I was sat on the wrong side, and this now has me all fired up to get my car completed and back out on rallies.

Many thanks to our service crew of Mick, Julian, and Georgina, and special thanks to Gary Lomas for letting me see what a well driven and well prepared Stratos can do!!