Rally experience

[Silver]

The missus bought me a rally experience at Silverstone for my birthday and I got round to doing it yesterday. Thankfully it's one of the few "track" activities that can actually benefit from crappy weather (since it was raining... just for a change).

https://img223.imageshack.us/img223/9216/picture326xg9.jpg

We were using Group N spec Fiesta STs, putting out around 150bhp with front wheel drive. It is probably the ideal car for this, because it's easy to drive and not unwieldy - you don't want to worry about how to drive the car itself when you're being taught rallying technique by the instructor. Anyway, we got a couple of sessions on their variable route circuit, which was long enough to be interesting but not too long that you didn't have time to learn it. There were about three corners that required some handbrake action to get round and it was interesting to learn how to do one properly... it took me a while to stop my natural instinct of counter-steering as soon as the car went into a slide.

https://img386.imageshack.us/img386/6708/picture335gj5.jpg

We got two sessions of around 10-15 minutes each which culminated in a timed lap - during which I came close to wiping out every pile of tyres I passed (mainly sideways). It might not be the fastest technique but it was the most fun... Finally we were taken in flying, passenger ride with our instructors. Wow. Some serious Scandinavian flicks and sliding gives you a real appreciation of just how different rallying is from "road" racing.

https://img223.imageshack.us/img223/1194/picture339hb5.jpg

All in all, a good laugh and very different from driving a car on a track - well worth doing if you've done a few events on track and want to try something different

[AJI]

Looks like you had fun I'd love to do something like that, one of my old workmates once did one somewhere in the North East... can't remember the name right now (all I know is that they also run a BRC team that uses Ford Pumas) and she came back buzzing.

I'd most like to do one of the winter ones in Sweden or something - frozen lakes for the win!
____________________
TARMAC - Automotive blog *UPDATED 26/3/09 - Abandoned fuel stations to go electric? ~ Buy my eBay stuff!
You're gonna go far, kid