Neil Howard Stage Rally 23rd Nov at Oulton Park

[Neil B]

Great day, from both sides of the fence.

Dai got a stage max, mechanical reasons meant they cut to finish

Think last year Mark / Chris were seeded higher but didn't do as well as usual, so were knocked down a bit for this year, but will be back up where they belong next year

you need to pop across Simon

Not sure what licence they had, just know that our eagle eyed signing on team spotted it was wrong, unfortunately its not something we can unsee

Hope everyone had fun

[roadrally_nova]

didnt finish the first stage mate electrical problems

dont worry were not the usual wingers love to beat a seeding as it should be, we were happy with the seeding there was some bloody lovly machinary out there . we could understand why we were there shame we couldnt get our 1st o/a on the seeding info iam sure that would have knocked us up a bit

[mef]

Sorry I'm a bit late in reporting on this event!

First time out for me since ending up in the ditch on Flanders! No mods to the car other than having replaced the M3 front anti-roll bar with the slightly softer 118D version. Other than that just the new BMW Motorsport colour scheme which seemed to attract a lot of attention and great comments!

Me and Tony went for a walk on the stage around 30 minutes before the start and although the grass was very frosty it was good to find that the tarmac was bone dry and not at all frosty. WE decided to run on the inters for the first stage and see how we got on. I noticed a lot of other crews made the same choice.

So, we set off on SS1 and found that it was no where as slippy as last year, good traction and the car pulled really well with the engine on form, 30bhp up over what it was last year, all went well and we found ourselves around 16th overall which wasn't too bad considering the high quality of the entry.

After SS1 the front inters were slightly melted so we swapped to slicks on the front leaving the inters on the rear since they didnt seem to have done too badly. Then SS2 went well once the front tyres warmed up.

During the day we gradually moved up the field, the time differences between us and some other cars in the top ten was only very small so it was pleasing to find that we were right on the pace of some top cars. At one point I saw that Lyndon Barton was just behind us on the stage in his powerful Escort and was very surprised when we pulled away from him accellerating up the hill!

Many people commented that we seemed to be locking up the brakes quite a bit. I knew this was happeneing since we had blue smoke come inside the car a few times under braking and in fact I flat spotted a couple of tyres during the day. When this happened the vibration through the steering was unbearable and it put me off a=quite a bit, I backed off since I thought a wheel was falling off! I think this is an area where I could make some improvements, I think maybe the rear brakes are far too big, the balance just isnt quite right, I have the balance bar fully to the front, maybe I can find some smaller rear discs to get less effort on the rear and get a better balance in the pedal box?

During the remainder of the 8 stages everything went perfect with the car, no mechanical problems at all but I did clout the front nearside wing on a chicane barrell and did a fair bit of damage to the wheelarch, more repairs required, need a new headlight too!

Going into stage 8, the last stage we were 5 seconds infront of our friend Adrian Spencer in his Subaru and looking to finish 10th overall but somehow he picked up a good time for SS8 and we went over 10 seconds slower, ending up in 11th position behind him! I made a few tiny mistakes here and there whilst trying too hard, its amazing how you drop time so easily!

All in all we had a great day, no problems at all and a very pleasing result. I came to realise that with the car at the level it is, I'm wasting my time trying to run on secondhand used tryes, in order to get the power down better and hence better times I need to run on new tyres like so many competitors in front of us in the results! This would probably help with the brakes locking up as the poor worn tyres dont have sufficient grip against the power of the big discs!

I was gutted for Chris Ransley not being able to run due to the wrong licence and also for Dai in Car17 with his SS1 overheating problems that he sorted for ss2, after that he set some cracking times! Great result fro Mark Jones & Chris in the Blue M3, 4th overall, fantastic result! He certainly showed a few WRC cars up!

Thanks to the team from BLMCC who ran a superb event yet again! Looking forward to 2014.

Martin.

[roadrally_nova]

new tyres your going soft we had help from bruvs on how to date our tyres apparently they are from 2001 was suprised they were so young ,the youngest we found were from 2005. weve decided tyres are like malt wiskey you need at least 8 yrs on them haha

[bruvs1]

Bit o.t but its all on how they've been stored really. But on the kumho tyres theres 4 digits for instance 5201 this means manufactured 52 week of 2001 then you've just got your compounds e.g k20 etc or if there as old as joneseys tyres k6?

[mef]

So therefore he could have won if he's been on brand new ones!

[bruvs1]

He'd have to buy some to answer that!