2018 UK Targa/Road Rallying Thread
Discussion
l354uge said:
Anyone else doing the Bramley targa this weekend?
Just managed to squeeze in through the reserve list, micra is sporting fresh tyres, sump and wishbones and I'm very excited!
Shame the trailer isn't ready, going to be a long day driving to Surrey and back..
Yes I'll be there marshaling, I was holding off entering until after the Saltire, which was postponed. And now Bramley is full! Never mind, happy to cone-watch. Just managed to squeeze in through the reserve list, micra is sporting fresh tyres, sump and wishbones and I'm very excited!
Shame the trailer isn't ready, going to be a long day driving to Surrey and back..
Fantastic day yesterday, despite the horrible journey down from Coventry.
A few driver and navigator errors, and finally an exhaust failure in my last test cost me any chance of a decent result, but I'm very happy with 3rd fastest overall in one of the tests with a 1l micra with no performance mods! (apart from the incredible maxsports). Mate I was sharing with was driving well too, in the top 20 OA before the car borked.
The organisation and routes were excellent considering it was the first running (May have to fix the Preston-esque connecting routes for next year though
), probably the best use of £45 I've ever done.
Time to fix the micra (again) for the next one!
A few driver and navigator errors, and finally an exhaust failure in my last test cost me any chance of a decent result, but I'm very happy with 3rd fastest overall in one of the tests with a 1l micra with no performance mods! (apart from the incredible maxsports). Mate I was sharing with was driving well too, in the top 20 OA before the car borked.
The organisation and routes were excellent considering it was the first running (May have to fix the Preston-esque connecting routes for next year though
), probably the best use of £45 I've ever done.Time to fix the micra (again) for the next one!
l354uge said:
Fantastic day yesterday, despite the horrible journey down from Coventry.
A few driver and navigator errors, and finally an exhaust failure in my last test cost me any chance of a decent result, but I'm very happy with 3rd fastest overall in one of the tests with a 1l micra with no performance mods! (apart from the incredible maxsports). Mate I was sharing with was driving well too, in the top 20 OA before the car borked.
The organisation and routes were excellent considering it was the first running (May have to fix the Preston-esque connecting routes for next year though ), probably the best use of £45 I've ever done.
Time to fix the micra (again) for the next one!
Glad you liked it, you both looked like you were having fun - as were most of the competitors. I was on the Stop/Go (Cones 11).... plenty committed driving going on.A few driver and navigator errors, and finally an exhaust failure in my last test cost me any chance of a decent result, but I'm very happy with 3rd fastest overall in one of the tests with a 1l micra with no performance mods! (apart from the incredible maxsports). Mate I was sharing with was driving well too, in the top 20 OA before the car borked.
The organisation and routes were excellent considering it was the first running (May have to fix the Preston-esque connecting routes for next year though
), probably the best use of £45 I've ever done.Time to fix the micra (again) for the next one!
thepawbroon said:
Glad you liked it, you both looked like you were having fun - as were most of the competitors. I was on the Stop/Go (Cones 11).... plenty committed driving going on.
Thankyou for standing in the freezing cold all day! I did find the placement of the stop/go in the tests after lunch somewhat strange. (especially when I got pissed off and took the dodgy corner nearly flat) 
It's been quiet around here......
(aside for Marshalling at the Clacton Rally this weekend) I've entered a couple of rallies:
4th May - Guildford MC's Jedi 12-car
3rd June - Ilkley Targa Rally
Really looking forward to getting back out in the car.....
(aside for Marshalling at the Clacton Rally this weekend) I've entered a couple of rallies:
4th May - Guildford MC's Jedi 12-car
3rd June - Ilkley Targa Rally
Really looking forward to getting back out in the car.....
Edited by thepawbroon on Wednesday 18th April 14:24
Hi,
Been lurking and watching this, I bought a 71 clubman at the back end of last year and we were booked onto the ToC that was postponed due to the bad weather. Me and the other half have never done any rallying or regularity based events so we were a bit unsure what to expect on the Ilkely, in fact she had only sat in the car for 5mins prior to the rally so there were a lot of unknowns.
We live reasonably local to the event which made things easier as i could drive the hour over to ilkley from Kirkby Lonsdale.
Anyway heres something i wrote on the mini forum i use, its pretty long winded sorry.
Ilkley Jubilee
After the false start that was the Tour of Cheshire I went looking for another event for us to have a go at, the Ilkley Jubilee was the closest so without really looking into it that much to see how hard it was/is, I entered and away we went.
The car was pretty much ready to go so the lead up was pretty relaxed, the club put on a novices training day the afternoon before so the other Half (V) set off a couple hours before me to go to that whilst I waited for my mum to come and take over child care duties, slight hiccup here as she was down in London where her other half works so was travelling back up on the Saturday morning, and managed to miss the train. So she was running a couple hours late which was potentially going to make me tight on time to set off and drive across to Ilkley for scruit and sign on. But a bit of on the hoof planning saw us right.
Car went through noise (89dB) and scruit with no issues and we were signed on in the pub to start the plotting whilst having a pint and some tea before 7. Now the plotting was fine, that is for the 3 regs we had, (That said I struggle with herring bones) but we managed. However there were 6 regs in total, so 3 plot and bash regs! We plotted the start and finish of these and looked at them as potential cut and runs to help us get back on time if needs be. With that it was off to the hotel I had booked which, was, well, cheap, and I am happy we were only there for the one night, still cheap is good.
Sunday Forecast wasn’t great giving heavy rain in the afternoon. There was also a (growing) list of other concerns –
- I had never really used the trip or set the calibration etc, it was wired in and I had driven around with it turned on to ensure it did work, I also
had all the instructions, just they were 75miles away on the kitchen worktop, thank god for wifi and roamertime+ having the full instructions
on the website.
- The car was a bit of an unknown, I think the most I had driven it in one stint was 60miles, it certainly hadn’t been used for 8 hours straight
in one go including tests in quarries etc
- Fuel gauge, it works, when its full it shows full when its half full it’ll show empty, when its empty, well you get the picture.
- I may also have forgotten to put the Map board in the car.
- Plot and bash, could be good, could be really bad!
So the trip started causing issues instantly, It randomly reset it self when 90% way round the measured distance, so we had to do it again, using more fuel. Which was full when I left the hotel, but was going down and I needed most of it to get to the fuel at lunch. Anyway 2nd time round the trip worked and we set the calibration, I had wanted to check it was calibrated correctly but there was no way I was going round the loop for a 3rd time. Then the car started to get a bit hot on the way back to the start venue at millstones. I had filled the rad before leaving home. At millstones I took the rad cap off to quite a bit of steam, I put a litre into the rad went to fill up the bottle to take with us and bumped into a very helpful guy who was doing the results and he lent me a map board.
The road book was based on tulips with the cumulative and intermediate distances, the first tulip in the road book on the transport section was nervous, as that would let us know if the trip was calibrated correctly, low and behold it was bang on, so suddenly Reg 1 which was plot and bash, based on tulips with the cumulative and intermediate distances suddenly seemed a little less of a task. And in all honestly going the right way was pretty straightforward, we ignored time/speed, pointless going the right speed if you are going in the wrong direction, V just told me the avg speed I was meant to be doing and I “attempted” to avg that. We got quite a few penalties for being early in the morning, this was mainly down to me forgetting that the speedo is set up for 12” wheels and reads low. Ah well. The reg was really good fun though as it took us down a private road into a farm yard and then along a rough rutty wet mess of a farm access track for ½ mile, which was entertaining on A008’s
At the end of reg 1 we showed our lack of experience. We were expecting a board or something to signify the reg had finished, we saw nothing and were sure we had gone the right way, but then we saw the car in front of us emerge from a side road, we instantly thought we had gone wrong and missed a little turning so doubled back, figured out we were right and that the car in front had gone wrong on the first instruction within the road book for the transport section to the start of reg 2. Now this wouldn’t have caused us an issue, but!!
There was a rally and a “run” event on, the run was for people without MSA licenses and they were on tulip road books the entire way round. We were last car of the rally starting at 71 with the run starting 3mins later with car 74, driven by a guy who was very good at this but he slipped in front of us on the road section and basically caused us problems in reg 2, the problem we had was that he was on a different event to us and i didn't know if he had the same average speeds we did, we caught them up and he kept stopping and starting and looked to be unsure of which way to go so i passed him in the reg, which he tried to have a go at me for at TC2. Anyway to give him his due when we started another leg before him later in the day and then wrong slotted he let us back past so we could try to recover our time.
Reg 3 was pre plotted and we did ok, went the right way and had a couple ITC’s were we were only on single digit penalties. Main thing was we hadn’t taken a wrong turn or missed a ITC on any of the regs. Then the fun started –
Next was 5 tests back to back at coldstones quarry.
Test 2 was the first test (they had lost a test venue late on I think hence starting the tests with test 2) and was flat out up the access road to the quarry for 1/3rd of a mile ish (I was flat out in 3rd when I got on the brakes) then slalom through 5 cones back on the throttle for another 1/3rd of a mile ish and another 5 cones to slalom through then a 300yrd dash to the stop astride, V couldn’t stop giggling after this test, I think it was a bit of a shock to the system after the gentle nature of the regs. We posted a good time on this test within the top half.
Test 3 and 4 were on the quarry floor which was pretty wet and nasty, test 3 we nailed and posted 22nd best time. Some heavy use of the hand brake helped!
Test 4 we flew round, there was a drop off the harder area of the quarry floor into some deeper gravel, we launched of this and the entire of the front end bottomed out onto the sump guard, it sounded a lot worse then it was as it was only on loose gravel nothing solid and immobile. But then right at the end I missed an instruction to 360 round the final cone so had to reverse back a couple yards and then go round it, we didn’t get a fail but it lost a bit of time.
Test 5 was a complicated long test (14 cones I think) round the loading bays for the trucks. I made one small error where I thought we had to go the left side rather than the right side of the cone, V managed to get me corrected before I had passed the cone so a quick 2 yrd reverse and away we went, I then took it steady on the rest of the test as it was complicated and I wanted to avoid a fail. That done we were to go back round to test 2 for a re run of that as test 6. And giddy after all the test shenanigans, we made a balls up of the transport section back.
The quarry had 2 entrances/entrance and a exit, I thought these were on the same road, so exit the quarry, turn left follow the road to turn left again to the entrance. WRONG. We missed a small turning up another road that took you back to the entrance, we seemed to make errors at the ends of things, like the end of a reg when you need to swap back to the road book or the tests were again you need to swap back to the road book, its just inexperience really.
Anyway the slight mistake wouldn’t have really mattered, but we were low on fuel, and could have done without the extra miles. Not that the thought of running out of fuel stopped me from nailing it along Test 6, a repeat of test 2 up the quarry access road, managed to trim 1 second of my previous time, it could have been more but we were catching a big old brute of a thing, and he left me very little room on the stop astride line next to him so I had to steady up a bit from the last cone to the stop astride.
That was the end of the morning loop with just a transport section to lunch and thankfully fuel!
Been lurking and watching this, I bought a 71 clubman at the back end of last year and we were booked onto the ToC that was postponed due to the bad weather. Me and the other half have never done any rallying or regularity based events so we were a bit unsure what to expect on the Ilkely, in fact she had only sat in the car for 5mins prior to the rally so there were a lot of unknowns.
We live reasonably local to the event which made things easier as i could drive the hour over to ilkley from Kirkby Lonsdale.
Anyway heres something i wrote on the mini forum i use, its pretty long winded sorry.
Ilkley Jubilee
After the false start that was the Tour of Cheshire I went looking for another event for us to have a go at, the Ilkley Jubilee was the closest so without really looking into it that much to see how hard it was/is, I entered and away we went.
The car was pretty much ready to go so the lead up was pretty relaxed, the club put on a novices training day the afternoon before so the other Half (V) set off a couple hours before me to go to that whilst I waited for my mum to come and take over child care duties, slight hiccup here as she was down in London where her other half works so was travelling back up on the Saturday morning, and managed to miss the train. So she was running a couple hours late which was potentially going to make me tight on time to set off and drive across to Ilkley for scruit and sign on. But a bit of on the hoof planning saw us right.
Car went through noise (89dB) and scruit with no issues and we were signed on in the pub to start the plotting whilst having a pint and some tea before 7. Now the plotting was fine, that is for the 3 regs we had, (That said I struggle with herring bones) but we managed. However there were 6 regs in total, so 3 plot and bash regs! We plotted the start and finish of these and looked at them as potential cut and runs to help us get back on time if needs be. With that it was off to the hotel I had booked which, was, well, cheap, and I am happy we were only there for the one night, still cheap is good.
Sunday Forecast wasn’t great giving heavy rain in the afternoon. There was also a (growing) list of other concerns –
- I had never really used the trip or set the calibration etc, it was wired in and I had driven around with it turned on to ensure it did work, I also
had all the instructions, just they were 75miles away on the kitchen worktop, thank god for wifi and roamertime+ having the full instructions
on the website.
- The car was a bit of an unknown, I think the most I had driven it in one stint was 60miles, it certainly hadn’t been used for 8 hours straight
in one go including tests in quarries etc
- Fuel gauge, it works, when its full it shows full when its half full it’ll show empty, when its empty, well you get the picture.
- I may also have forgotten to put the Map board in the car.
- Plot and bash, could be good, could be really bad!
So the trip started causing issues instantly, It randomly reset it self when 90% way round the measured distance, so we had to do it again, using more fuel. Which was full when I left the hotel, but was going down and I needed most of it to get to the fuel at lunch. Anyway 2nd time round the trip worked and we set the calibration, I had wanted to check it was calibrated correctly but there was no way I was going round the loop for a 3rd time. Then the car started to get a bit hot on the way back to the start venue at millstones. I had filled the rad before leaving home. At millstones I took the rad cap off to quite a bit of steam, I put a litre into the rad went to fill up the bottle to take with us and bumped into a very helpful guy who was doing the results and he lent me a map board.
The road book was based on tulips with the cumulative and intermediate distances, the first tulip in the road book on the transport section was nervous, as that would let us know if the trip was calibrated correctly, low and behold it was bang on, so suddenly Reg 1 which was plot and bash, based on tulips with the cumulative and intermediate distances suddenly seemed a little less of a task. And in all honestly going the right way was pretty straightforward, we ignored time/speed, pointless going the right speed if you are going in the wrong direction, V just told me the avg speed I was meant to be doing and I “attempted” to avg that. We got quite a few penalties for being early in the morning, this was mainly down to me forgetting that the speedo is set up for 12” wheels and reads low. Ah well. The reg was really good fun though as it took us down a private road into a farm yard and then along a rough rutty wet mess of a farm access track for ½ mile, which was entertaining on A008’s
At the end of reg 1 we showed our lack of experience. We were expecting a board or something to signify the reg had finished, we saw nothing and were sure we had gone the right way, but then we saw the car in front of us emerge from a side road, we instantly thought we had gone wrong and missed a little turning so doubled back, figured out we were right and that the car in front had gone wrong on the first instruction within the road book for the transport section to the start of reg 2. Now this wouldn’t have caused us an issue, but!!
There was a rally and a “run” event on, the run was for people without MSA licenses and they were on tulip road books the entire way round. We were last car of the rally starting at 71 with the run starting 3mins later with car 74, driven by a guy who was very good at this but he slipped in front of us on the road section and basically caused us problems in reg 2, the problem we had was that he was on a different event to us and i didn't know if he had the same average speeds we did, we caught them up and he kept stopping and starting and looked to be unsure of which way to go so i passed him in the reg, which he tried to have a go at me for at TC2. Anyway to give him his due when we started another leg before him later in the day and then wrong slotted he let us back past so we could try to recover our time.
Reg 3 was pre plotted and we did ok, went the right way and had a couple ITC’s were we were only on single digit penalties. Main thing was we hadn’t taken a wrong turn or missed a ITC on any of the regs. Then the fun started –
Next was 5 tests back to back at coldstones quarry.
Test 2 was the first test (they had lost a test venue late on I think hence starting the tests with test 2) and was flat out up the access road to the quarry for 1/3rd of a mile ish (I was flat out in 3rd when I got on the brakes) then slalom through 5 cones back on the throttle for another 1/3rd of a mile ish and another 5 cones to slalom through then a 300yrd dash to the stop astride, V couldn’t stop giggling after this test, I think it was a bit of a shock to the system after the gentle nature of the regs. We posted a good time on this test within the top half.
Test 3 and 4 were on the quarry floor which was pretty wet and nasty, test 3 we nailed and posted 22nd best time. Some heavy use of the hand brake helped!
Test 4 we flew round, there was a drop off the harder area of the quarry floor into some deeper gravel, we launched of this and the entire of the front end bottomed out onto the sump guard, it sounded a lot worse then it was as it was only on loose gravel nothing solid and immobile. But then right at the end I missed an instruction to 360 round the final cone so had to reverse back a couple yards and then go round it, we didn’t get a fail but it lost a bit of time.
Test 5 was a complicated long test (14 cones I think) round the loading bays for the trucks. I made one small error where I thought we had to go the left side rather than the right side of the cone, V managed to get me corrected before I had passed the cone so a quick 2 yrd reverse and away we went, I then took it steady on the rest of the test as it was complicated and I wanted to avoid a fail. That done we were to go back round to test 2 for a re run of that as test 6. And giddy after all the test shenanigans, we made a balls up of the transport section back.
The quarry had 2 entrances/entrance and a exit, I thought these were on the same road, so exit the quarry, turn left follow the road to turn left again to the entrance. WRONG. We missed a small turning up another road that took you back to the entrance, we seemed to make errors at the ends of things, like the end of a reg when you need to swap back to the road book or the tests were again you need to swap back to the road book, its just inexperience really.
Anyway the slight mistake wouldn’t have really mattered, but we were low on fuel, and could have done without the extra miles. Not that the thought of running out of fuel stopped me from nailing it along Test 6, a repeat of test 2 up the quarry access road, managed to trim 1 second of my previous time, it could have been more but we were catching a big old brute of a thing, and he left me very little room on the stop astride line next to him so I had to steady up a bit from the last cone to the stop astride.
That was the end of the morning loop with just a transport section to lunch and thankfully fuel!
No need to apologise at all, he wasn't wrong with what he said and clearly he is experienced, and us being at the back in car 71 clearly aren't.
Like I said my main confusion was we were technically on different events so I was unsure if he was on the same reg route and avg speeds as we were etc.
Like I said my main confusion was we were technically on different events so I was unsure if he was on the same reg route and avg speeds as we were etc.
28hodge said:
No need to apologise at all, he wasn't wrong with what he said and clearly he is experienced, and us being at the back in car 71 clearly aren't.
Like I said my main confusion was we were technically on different events so I was unsure if he was on the same reg route and avg speeds as we were etc.
Excellent report, looking forward to the second half. I expect we will see you out on future events?. Perhaps the Ilkley Targa which is coming up on the 3rd June.Like I said my main confusion was we were technically on different events so I was unsure if he was on the same reg route and avg speeds as we were etc.
Our result on the Jubilee wasn't quite what I'd aimed at, but we enjoyed ourselves. I wasn't out with my normal driver (Busy on the Scottish malts) but was standing in for one of the organizers in Stephen Johnson's RS2000 (car 24). We didn't have the best of mornings, the trip wasn't quite right for the first two regs, I adjusted it for the third and it was reading right, but we still had a 22 early then a 24 late over two controls, I always suspect a timing error when that happens. We were badly caught out by the Fog up at the Quarry, over exuberance on the first test saw us sliding completely passed the first two cones, which leapt out of the mist at upwards 70 mph, ended up with a wrong test and 1.30 penalty.
The afternoon went better, but the we had a mare on the last test at Scargill Reservoir, Stephen was going like a Train and we caught the Car in front (a 911RS) on the finish line, I stopped my clock on 2.08, which i knew was a bloody fast time. When i checked my timecard I had been given 1.04 which is pretty impossible. Checking with the Car in front he had exactly the same finish time, so I thought it was right, perhaps the start clock was a minute late (it happens). When the results were posted the car in front had apparently beaten the Bogey and we had a very slow time. I put the query in and it transpired the Marshal was all over the place. We ended up being given a of 2.31 which was 30 seconds faster than the Porsche on the basis he started 30 seconds earlier. It's all they could have done I suppose, but neither time was right.
We would up 19th overall missing out on second in class by 11 seconds, to the same damned Porsche !!!.
Overall it was a cracking event, as it always is, one of the highlights this year being the return to rallying of a local (in fact national) legend Ronnie Beacroft, multiple winner of the Motoring News Rally championship and probably one of the quickest Tarmac rally drivers this country has ever produced. He was grinning from ear to ear all day and will be back.
It was his Farm we went though on reg 1 by the way.
Funny you should mention scargill quarry test times, we went reasonably well through there, we were first car through in the batch (it was one way in and out, so they let 8-10 cars down then parked them at the far end and brought us out in convoy) it was pretty greasy in there. Anyway we did a pretty good test, stopped got our time pulled forward to the holding lane, and saw the car after us approaching the hairpin at the end of the test.
When we got the results our time through that test was 50sec over, the car behind was only given 20sec over, which would have meant he would have had to catch us, he didn't, I'd of said he was pretty much 30sec back of us still, so i think we unfairly received 30secs of penalty, in reality it made little difference to our position in class or cat but would have put us 2 places higher overall.
Not sure about the targa, i have had a look at it this morning, but I race motor bikes and the other half who was Nav competes on horse's and at the minute weddings stag do's, holidays the other half's horse events bike racing and rallying all seem to be clashing.
When we got the results our time through that test was 50sec over, the car behind was only given 20sec over, which would have meant he would have had to catch us, he didn't, I'd of said he was pretty much 30sec back of us still, so i think we unfairly received 30secs of penalty, in reality it made little difference to our position in class or cat but would have put us 2 places higher overall.
Not sure about the targa, i have had a look at it this morning, but I race motor bikes and the other half who was Nav competes on horse's and at the minute weddings stag do's, holidays the other half's horse events bike racing and rallying all seem to be clashing.
Interesting, sounds like the finish marshals were still struggling when you got to them.
It’s not easy when cars on 30 seconds and I think they only had one clock, unlike the finish controls on the duplicated tests who had two.
I’m sure the team will have picked up on that, I expect it will also get debated at the next IDMC meeting too.
It’s not easy when cars on 30 seconds and I think they only had one clock, unlike the finish controls on the duplicated tests who had two.
I’m sure the team will have picked up on that, I expect it will also get debated at the next IDMC meeting too.
velocemitch said:
Evenings are getting a bit bright for 12 cars aren't they?. What time do you start?.
Not sure if our RLO would be OK with a 'daylight' 12 car.
I see you have an entry in for the Ilkley Targa.
Yes - last one of the "winter" - sunset officially 20h29 and first car away 21h15.Not sure if our RLO would be OK with a 'daylight' 12 car.
I see you have an entry in for the Ilkley Targa.
I'm looking forward to Ilkley, need to get the car sorted by then!
YorkshirePudding said:
Anyone down at the Border 200 this weekend?
Marshalling Fri as I'm working Sun.
Cant do Jez, bank holidays are sacred I’m afraid.Marshalling Fri as I'm working Sun.
Think we have four or five Ilkley guys out though. Nick Pullan has talked Henry Car into a ride in the ‘works’ Alto!, which would be a laugh!.
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