Well, that’s the last championship round completed, over a very windy and wet weekend at the Sweet Lamb rally complex in Wales, clearing up only for the last few hours of Sunday. Certainly it didn’t start particularly well for us, with a late afternoon arrival following traffic jams on the way over meaning that we only got to walk the first third of the course before it got dark, leaving the prospect of driving the remainder of it blind on the first run on the Saturday. As it was the end of the season, we had treated ourselves to the nearest hotel rooms, about 5 miles away - sadly, the road from Sweet Lamb to the hotel was firmly closed by the police as there had been a bad accident, leaving us with 2-hour, 76-mile detour to get to the hotel......still, at least we got there before the bar shut.
Great to see fellow CA’ers Dan Lowe and Rick Cutler come up for the weekend to spectate and drink beer. We even managed to persuade Dan Lowe to be installed in my co-driver’s seat for one of the runs; mind you, he didn’t need much persuading
the broad smile at the end of it spoke volumes
.
On to the racing, and a testing, very fast course was run over 7 miles, with a real mixed bag of gravel tracks, open moors (for which read bogs) with a couple of small “quarry” sections and 2 river crossings, all up and down some serious gradients over a 1,500 foot height range - of course, the recent weather ensured that there was plenty of water and plenty of mud. The first two runs on the Saturday were entertaining, with reasonable times. The course was easy to learn quickly, but we had what appeared to be a fuel starvation problem at the end of a long 2-mile drag uphill, with a few hundred yards of very slippery mud towards the end of it. The engine decided to revert to idle
thus losing drive for about 5-15 seconds, in the same place at the top of that long uphill section on each run - it seemed to be resolved by cleaning some muck out of the fuel filters and replacing a dysfunctional breather valve. As the problem didn’t reappear that day, the remaining 6 runs were good and quick still, and we ran well in the top ten.
Sunday dawned with more rain and miserable grey skies, with the situation made more challenging by finding (only about 40 minutes before the first run of the day) that two of the rear radius arm bushes had disintegrated and needed replacing (yes, we should have checked more thoroughly before heading off to the hotel on Saturday, but the lure of draught Stella was too great
....). Our stalwart mechanics, despite one being very unwell from the night before, played a real blinder and, despite the lack of shelter (it was too windy to put ours up) and the rain, they had both bushes replaced in under 30 minutes, allowing us to get to the start line on time for the first run of the day. With the rain, some sections of the course had become even boggier, which sapped power from the engine and increased the running temperature, which on our first run then exposed the real root of the previous day’s problem - not fuel starvation, but a hitherto unknown water temperature sensor, integral to the engine block and linked to the ECU, that instead of cutting in at around 120 degrees was now cutting in at only 105 degrees and causing the engine to revert to safety idle mode until the temperature reduced. So on the remaining runs, by easing off a touch going up the long uphill drag, the engine kept working and we still managed to achieve good enough times to give us second in class and 11th overall.
We entered our first national season hoping firstly, not make fools of ourselves and, secondly, that the pinnacle would be making a top ten finish at one of the rounds. With the result from that final round, we end the season as the British Off Road Champions for Class E (prototype, sub 3-litre) and have achieved 8th place overall in the Championship standings, so we are chuffed to bits - not bad for a little BMW 2.5 litre turbo-diesel up against the big V8s.
Thanks for the advice on gearboxes before the season and for the various support during it. We will be entering next season’s championship and, over the winter, will be looking to change the engine, probably for a BMW 3.0 litre diesel, which will keep us in the same class, but with a multi-valve head and considerably more power and torque than the existing lump, will pull us the notch or two needed to mix it for overall honours next year. Now then - anyone got a spare engine lying around?
MG Mark
