Guide To Rally Co Driving
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Here are a few true stories from my rallying plus a few that have been passed on to me by friends... Please email me your favorite true rally stories and I'll be happy to share them with the world! How to combine shopping for shoes with rallying.... Traffic stop on the M62 - part one.... Traffic stop on the M62 - part two.... The most optimisitic co-driver ever.... A question of priorities and keeping your wife happy....
The big blue road.... When I was about 17 years old, two of my friends announced that they would compete on a road rally together. Neither had competed on an event before this, so a group of us went along to spectate. After the final car came past it became clear that our friends had already dropped out of the rally, so we headed home to await news of their fate. When the boys finally arrived, the co-driver sheepishly admitted that they had run out of time. It seems that he saw a large blue road on the map that looked like it would be a great short cut. Unfortunately, the blue road in question is a river…
How to combine shopping for shoes with rallying.... One very cold and icy night in December a road rally was run in North Yorkshire, England. The hero of this story is a driver friend of mine, who decided to take a gamble and run virtually slick tires figuring that he would be careful on the icy parts, and gain time on the dry sections. On a non-competitive 30 mph section, the route passed through a small village. As the crew in question entered the village center, they hit a patch of black ice, and spun backwards through the front window of a small shoe shop. The owner lived above the shop, and came down stairs to find the car was buried under a sea of shoes and boots and shop fittings. The driver, still sitting in the car, grabbed a nearby left shoe and said, “If you can you find the matching right one I’ll take these”. The shop owner wasn’t amused! He disappeared upstairs to call the police. There’s a final twist to this story. When the police car arrived, it hit the same black ice, and crashed into the rally car. No tickets were given out that night….
The Italian Job.... In 1988, I was co-driving for John Naylor in England. We had just begun competing on “foreign” events, and decided that it would be fun to go to Italy and compete on the Rally of Elba. John had recently closed his business, and was very short of cash, so the entire event would be done on a shoestring budget. The ferry from Italy to the Island of Elba is about 1250 miles from our home town (according to Google which was of course non-existent at that time) and takes about twenty hours in ideal conditions in a car. With our service van carrying four people, spare tires, parts, and towing a trailer with a rally car on it, I estimated the journey would take about thirty-five hours (averaging about 35 mph). As the saying goes, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”, so we sought out the locals favorite bar and pizza restaurant. We had all been awake for over forty hours by this time, so it didn’t take many beers before we were all well buzzed except for John who decided wisely to stay sober as he would be our driver for the ferry crossing. We left the bar at closing time around 2.00 a.m. and got back into the van. We set off for the short drive to the ferry terminal, and had only driven about a hundred yards when we turned a corner and were faced with a police roadblock. This was a serious deal, with several police cars, and many armed police pointing guns at us. We stopped. A moment later I felt the wrong end of a gun being pressed against the side of my head, while an overly excited Italian cop yelled at me. I was sitting in the front passenger seat alongside John. The service crew guys in the back seemed to have vanished as they ducked down. After I had a chance to assess the situation, I figured out that:
This third point is important because we were in a British van, so the driver’s seat is on the right. Clearly the cop figured I was the driver. Lacking any Italian, the best solution to this problem I could think of was to pretend to drive the van with an imaginary steering wheel. It took a little while, but the cop finally got the message, and went around and pointed his gun at John instead! After John took a breath test and came up negative for alcohol, we were allowed on our way....
Call me a taxi.... In the mid 80's I was navigating on a road rally that used a section of U.K. B Class road for a few hundred yards. Most road rallies avoided using B road because they are wide, relatively straight, and are fairly well used by non-rally traffic. Combine all of the above and you have a recipe for a high speed crash involving rally cars and the public, so not a good combination. I was competing with my regular driver in a Ford Escort RS2000. The driver's son was also competing as a novice a little further back in the field of cars. We were doing about 100 mph up the B road section and went into a blind fast right bend pretty much on the limit. As we went through the bend. we (too late) saw a taxi parked outside the only house on the B road, and as we passed by the rear door opened in front of us. My driver didn't stand a chance of missing the door and didn't lift off the throttle, and we hardly noticed the impact as we clipped the door with our rear corner as we drifted by. Clipping the door at 100 mph was enough to remove it from the taxi however as I observed in my door mirror as the door bounced down the road, luckily without injuring the passenger. Rallies in those days were often run on open public roads, and I'm not proud to admit that most competitors and some organizers disregarded traffic laws, so it wasn't a big surprise that rallies of this type were effectively outlawed in the late 80's. We continued on our way, and finished the rally a few hours later. Ten minutes or so later, my driver's son also arrived having finished the rally. I noticed some minor panel damage that was very similar to that on our car and asked what happened. Here is what he said.. ...."We were on that fast B road section, and we hit a taxi. I saw the driver was just getting in but his door was wide open in the road and I hit it. The weird thing was it looked like the taxi was already missing a rear door, but anyhow, now it's missing two doors"....
Call me a helicopter.... One of the most difficult events I ever competed on was the Algarve Rally in Portugal. I was told at the time that one year, the winner was the ONLY car that finished. I can't confirm that, but I don't doubt it. When John Naylor (or Najlor John as the locals called him) and I took part in 1987 there were only thirteen finishers (we were the thirteenth) out of over one hundred entered. One stage was a gravel and red clay like mud track that began about a mile from the ocean, then ran along the top of a cliff for a few miles. As we sat on the start line, I went over my first few notes with John. Essentially the first part was a straight road towards the ocean, with three jumps, and after the final jump you either turned square left, or if you got it wrong you fell about a hundred feet into the Mediterranean... Off we went down the stage using all 96 bhp of the pitiful Lada, and hit the first jump, then the second jump, and then "F**k"...... As we cleared the third jump, we both looked straight ahead to see a news helicopter that we were about to hit head-on. By some miracle, we missed it by inches, and somehow made the left turn. That was day one of the rally, and we had the luxury of an overnight parc ferme, so like all professional teams we parked the car, got changed, and headed to the nearest bar. For some reason the bar owner was very excited to see us and was trying to tell us a story in Portuguese, and just when we thought he had given up trying, he arrived back. This time he was carrying his (old, heavy 22 inch CRT) television set from his living room, which he set down on the bar. Next he arrived with a VCR. Finally after connecting everything up, he put in a tape and pressed play. Apparently the news helicopter had filmed the entire episode, and we were big news in Portugal. I could even read my own lips as I said "F**k, with John in perfect sync.... I'd love to get a copy of that tape, but as we all now know, if it happened before the Internet was invented (by Al Gore), it didn't really happen!
Avoiding speeding fines.... In 1988 John Naylor and I competed in the Saturnus Rally in Slovenia (still a part of Yugoslavia at that time). This was during a period of turmoil and hyper-inflation in that region (for example, the Dinar dropped in value by fifty percent over the period of the rally). From our perspective this meant that everything was incredibly cheap, and for a team on a budget that made a great rally very affordable. This was a pace note rally, and I'd scheduled three days for John and I to take write and check the notes. As we reached the outskirts of the city of Ljubljana on the first day, we drove too fast through a police speed trap and were waved to the side of the road by a police motorcyclist. Once the cop had figured out who was driving (the steering wheel was on the right), he tried to explain to John what he had done, but he only spoke Serbo Croatian so we didn’t understand a word that he said. In return, John argued at length in English, which the cop didn’t understand. Finally, the cop pulled out his wallet and counted out some Dinar, and it became clear that he was showing us how much “fine” we needed to pay. Yet more arguing ensued, and finally I resolved the issue by handing over the correct amount of cash. As we drove away John was clearly upset about my paying the fine. When I explained to John that we’d just spent twenty minutes arguing over being fined the equivalent of twenty British pence (about thirty US cents), he saw the funny side of the situation! Over the next few days, we passed the same speed trap several more times, and each passing became a game for us. The first time, we simply sped in, handed over the money, and sped out. The next time we didn’t even stop, and simply threw a few Dinar notes out of the window as we sped through. By the final few passes we deliberately speeded up, and the cops waved and cheered as we threw out several times the amount of Dinar needed each time we passed by. I somehow can’t imagine that happening in the U.K or the USA.…
Traffic stop on the M62 - part one.... In the late eighties, I competed on the British National Championship with John Naylor running in the “Lada Challenge”. We had no sponsors at the time, and neither of us had much spare cash, so to say we did this on a tight budget would be an understatement. In fact, the rally car was built out of a former taxi with over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer that John bought for five hundred pounds, and the total project cost just over a thousand pounds. John found an old Toyota diesel van in a scrap yard that became our service barge, and each rally we borrowed an old trailer from a friend. We probably still hold the record for the cheapest car and service barge to compete on a major International rally! It was the trailer that got the attention of a motorway policeman as we were returning home one evening after a rally in Wales. He came up alongside, and signaled to John to pull over to the side of the M62 motorway, so John complied. After the usual license check, the cop decided to take a look around the trailer, and a few moments later appeared at the driver’s window. “Do you know that all of the tires on your trailer are bald” he asked? John pondered for a moment, then replied, “Well officer, last night we parked the trailer outside our hotel, and this morning we came out and found that someone had stolen a brand new set of wheels and tires that we’d just put on last week..”. He continued, “..and with it being Sunday we couldn't find anywhere open to buy new parts, so we went to the scrap yard and bought these wheels just so we could get home”.“So how about the lights on the trailer” the cop asked? John paused then said, “The trailer lights don't work, but we had a temporary trailer light board, and whoever stole the wheels also stole that”. The cop looked unconvinced, but decided to be lenient (I suspect he took pity on us). “Okay. I’m going to let you go, but you have a choice; I can either give you a fixed penalty ticket or a notice-to-repair. If you want the NTR you’ll have seventy-two hours to repair the vehicle and take it to a vehicle inspection station to get the NTR signed-off”. John immediately said “Thank you officer, I’ll take the NTR please”. What the officer couldn’t have known is that John was at that time employed at a vehicle inspection station, so he could simply sign off on the repair! The cop walked back to his Range Rover to write out the NTR. When he was out of earshot, John said to me “Give me the tax-disc”, which I did, as John explained that the disc in the windshield (similar to license plate tags) was from another vehicle, and the van wasn’t taxed. He stuffed the disc in his pocket, because having the wrong disc is fraud, serious crime, and far worse than a traffic ticket. The cop arrived back at the van and handed John the NTR, and told us we could go. As he walked back to his car, he stopped and slowly turned around as if he had remembered something, then came back to John’s window. “When I pulled you over Sir, this van had a tax-disc. Would you care to explain where it went”? the cop said. John replied in a flash, “Oh for fucks sake, don’t tell me that’s been stolen now…” The cop looked at John, looked at me, looked back at John and said, “Just get out of my sight, and don’t EVER let me see you again”! Needless to say, we left before the cop changed his mind.
Traffic stop on the M62 - part two.... Six months or so later, and we were on the same road, on another Sunday evening returning from another rally. The trailer had the same old bald tires, the same broken lights, and yet another vehicle’s tax-disc was fraudulently displayed. Just like the previous time, the cop waved to John to stop, and we pulled over onto the shoulder. The cop had a quick look at the trailer, and approached John’s window when, in an instant, it seemed like he suddenly remembered the previous time he’d stopped us. He glared at John while he struggled to find the right words to use. In the back of the van, the kettle was boiling as one of our service crew was making cups of tea, and John finally broke the awkward silence and said, “Do you want a cup of tea Officer”? The cop's face reddened, he shook his head, and just said, “Fuck off – NOW” and turned and walked back to his car! We did as instructed, and I'll always be grateful to that cop!
The most optimisitic co-driver ever.... I was told a great story by a rally driver friend. He was competing in a rally in Wales and was driving down a steep section of gravel road typical of the sort often found in forests, with multiple hairpin bends interspersed with short straights. On one of the hairpins, he went too wide, and the car rolled down the hillside gradually destroying it, and finally came to rest on the same road but several levels down. The car was wrecked, with wheels missing, suspension struts pushed through their mounts, and clearly the rally was over. The co-driver (high on adrenaline) had different ideas however, and the instant the car stopped moving he looked around, pointed up the road in the opposite direction to that the car was now facing, and shouted………. ……. “THAT WAY”!!!
A question of priorities and keeping your wife happy.... A popular north of England rally driver was competing in a forest rally in the English Lake District, and his co-driver told me this story… On one of the stages they were really “going for it” when the driver made a mistake and their car slid off the road. Unfortunately, they were at the top of a large drop, and the car plummeted for several hundred feet. Miraculously the car fell into some dense fir trees, and they landed quite gently upside down, with only minor damage to the car and not a scratch on either crew member. As they exited the car, the first thing the driver said to the co-driver was, “Can you check if my thermos flask is okay”? “My wife will kill me if I’ve bust it”! |
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