Our first event of the year was to be at Kames motorsport complex in Ayrshire, a very compact tight and twisty tarmac event, on Sunday 15th July.
Friday night saw stress levels go through the roof as I could not find the log book for the Mex. I had put it somewhere so safe that I couldn’t find it. This ladies, is why blokes leave stuff in a heap on the floor. It’s so we know where to find it!!
I spent the Saturday morning sitting in the sunshine discussing tactics with Team manager Tag the Lakeland Terrier before going down to Mitch’s to load up.
Hurst/Hurst. Photo by DRH Photography.
We had the usual crew Mitch, Ryan, Dan and myself heading North. Kames is in the middle of nowhere so we were staying on Strathclyde at the Hilton no less. Great for relaxing, but not for drinking, £23.00 a round. So we caught a taxi to a local pub/carvery. On the way back the taxi driver thought Ryan was Polish!
Sunday morning was fine when we went out to the van, but by the time we got over to the venue it was wild and raining. I had shorts and t shirt on, as being the only English crew there we had to show we were hard, so I was soaked early on as we got scrutineered.
We were car 15 and I had to take care not to put the numbers on the door as 51 as that is more like us.
The opening stages were very slippy and I locked the brakes up a couple of times and
Hurst/Hurst. Photo by DRH Photography.
overshot some of the very tight hairpins. It was first gear around a couple then straight into another hairpin. The wind was drying the Stages out during the day and things got much better for us in the dry. I was using Yokohama A048s for the first time and they seemed a vast improvement from the usual ten years old Colway inters!
We had an intermittent misfire as the distributor cap kept turning but it didn’t affect us that much.
The afternoon was run the opposite way and the finish was over a rather lairy drop off. One or two cars crashed out including a Corsa that took a wheel off in front of us, and had we not lost twenty seconds or so while we stopped to check they were ok, we would have won the event, honest.
When the final stage was over we not only brought the car home in one piece but we were 14th overall.
It had been a good day with plenty of other retro machinery competing. Several Escorts, a Manta, a Kadett and an Ascona. There was also a Stratos entered but he must have heard about us and didn’t bother showing.
Gardiner/Nicolson. Photo by DRH Photography.
Man of the day was Alan Gardiner from Mull who had a fabulous and very quick MK1. Unfortunately he retired on the last pair of stages handing the win to some wealthy guy in a new shape Subaru.
Many many thanks to Mitch and Ryan and to Ann and Steve who came up to cheer us on and help out.
TAG Sport “home of the serious rally team”
Hurst/Hurst of TAG Sport Rally Team.
