Seeded first in my first outing! Who made up this start order, maybe someone with psychic tendencies or psychological problems? The next 90 miles would tell. The number 7 though is the lucky number of a large proportion of the human population but would it bring us luck (me superstitious, never)?
At 19:07, armed with my now well-worn copy of sheet 66, still bearing NAM triangles and faded pencil lines from previous rallies, we started in Derek’s trusty Rover 400 on our latest outing.

The first two sections criss-crossed the A1 in a couple of loops sandwiched between Haddington and Tranent. No problems recorded, however I discovered via the shout of “triangle” from the offside seat and the sound of ABS on wet tarmac a new NAM feature for my map in section 2. [See Derek’s comment below]. Long way round picked us up a code so at TC2 we were confident that we were clean.

Section 3 took us via 2 loops in and out of downtown Tranent. A re-classification (and re-alignment) of a road in the town centre saw us take the second shortest route however not expecting to see any codes placed meant that our excursion was without penalty. I have since heard of a few crews taking much larger deviations and dropping time. Towns are always tricky to navigate through on a Landranger but maybe some were off-put by the sights and sounds of an East Lothian town in the heat of a Saturday night!

Sections 4 and 5 saw us move from East Lothian into Midlothian to the halfway halt at Fordel services on the A68.

I always think that a re-group is a great idea as it lets crews get together, share ideas on the previous sections whilst still fresh in the mind and gives an opportunity for comfort breaks. All cars arrived, a good sign for the event, and mixed reports showed that the foregoing had not been easy for all crews. Many reported dropped codes and/or time and so I was pleased, as we were still on schedule with no apparent dropped codes (if you’re polite to the marshals at TCs they will normally tell you if you have the full quota for the previous section). A possible clean first half for us, things seemed to be going well.

Section 6 was a straight drive down the A68 with a couple of small loops at Fordel Mains and Whitburgh Mains via Pathhead. This section was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first was that we were crossing the previous route of section 5, just southeast of Lothian Bridge at Pathhead. Normally this is not allowed in a navigational route but we had been warned of this at the competitors briefing and it was explained that the RSAC had approved the route choice. We had deliberated the implications of this but it caused us no problems with crossing rally traffic due to the previous halt.
More significantly for us, TC6 was located in a white lay-by, about a mile southeast of Pathhead. We were on time in the section but as we pulled out onto the A68 we were soon behind another, slower moving competitor. The road ahead was clear, an overtake was possible, so we did, passing this car just at the point where an un-seen code was placed into the nearside verge. We obviously had a car between the all-important code and us so we coasted into the TC unaware of the first missed code. It was only at the finish that we realised we had missed a code there.

Derek later explained that Oly McCollum had used a similar ploy on the same event in 2000, which had caught out some other competitors, although not Ewan (clerk of the course this time) and Derek. Ewan had obviously remembered this – so had Oly, he cleaned the route in the historic class – and so he adopted the same trick, and we fell foul.

We had been on time, the overtake was not essential, codes on the side of A roads are not commonplace, I had not instructed the proximity of the TC, all lessons learnt for the future.

Sections 7 to 11 took us back to East Lothian around the widely used lanes and features such as Costerton Ford (reasonably dry), and the many NAM triangles.
A first look of the Humbie church hairpin was given to me in section 11.
Derek had tackled this in past events in cars such as Minis and Maestros (he’ll be able to better recount tales). It’s a very tight, up-hill left hairpin which the handbrake and size of the Rover could not manage in a one but a quick 3-pointer got us away unscathed, a couple of spectators left in our wake. I hope they had good night’s entertainment at that junction.

Section 8 saw us drop code number 2. I overlooked a well-disguised small white road through woodland in GS 4268. We had been given a 6-figure MR to pass through at the west end of the track, however my pencil line had obscured the bit to the east of the MR. We stopped and discussed the MR, which is really a 100-metre square that appeared to catch the A6093 so we continued straight along, missing the loop and the code. The TC8 marshals confirmed we had dropped the code, to our knowledge the first we had missed and first blood (actually second) to the organisers.
The final two sections took us farther down the A68 to Oxton. A treat was in store for the final section as were to navigate a 2 mile, unsurfaced white through farmland to the west of Oxton. This was used the previous year in the Early Winter and so I had pre-briefed Derek and a few others on its feature. The first part was rougher than I had remembered but we navigated it without incident and found ourselves at the finish TC. Car in one piece, crew smiling, job done!

We had dropped no time, but knew of the one code that had eluded us. As we gathered at Oxton village hall and began to hear of the second code we had dropped, things didn’t look too good for a place that would match our seeding. As the provisional results came through it appeared that others in class had dropped time and more codes, so a large 1 was placed next to our names in the column for position in class. We had won the class with a final result of 30 minutes (2 codes).

The crystal ball of the organiser had actually predicted our class seeding perfectly (sorry to who ever it was if I suggested psychological problems earlier) with a 1,2,3 as per the entry list – Lucky number 7 came up trumps.

There were two clean sheets in each of the open and historic classes, which were resolved by timed navigational tests but the other scores showed that no-one had gone OTL or picked up ridiculously high scores, so it proved to be a great event from everybody’s point of view.

Nuit Blanche 2005 - Results

Open Class

1. Jamie Seth/Iain Craven (Peugeot 306 Cabriolet) 0.00 (after tie-break),
2. Charlie Brown/Gordon Reid (Honda Civic) 0.00,
3. Alan Cowan/Lock Horsburgh (Fiat Brava) 5.00,
4. Michael Craigs/Euan Brodie (VW Polo) 24.00,
5. Dave Brown/Joel Haylock (Alfa 146) 30.00,
6. Charles Brown/Neil Turner (VW Lupo) 45.00.

Non-Expert

7. Derek McLean/Jason Ferry (Rover 420) 30.00,
8. Barry Rice/Alan Maxwell (Peugeot 205 GTi) 59.00,
9. Shiona Rothon/Andrew Brougham (Subaru Impreza) 60.00;

Novice

10. Ian Munro/James Stewart (Ford Fiesta) 49.00,
11. Jon Huffer/Peter Humphrey (Ford Fiesta) 50.00,
12. Gavin Gray/Andrew Gray (Citroen C5) 62.00,
13. Steven Campbell/Tasha George (Ford Focus ST170) 63.00.

Rallyschool

14. Rob Gallagher/Amy Jones (Seat Ibiza Cupra) 161.00.

 

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Updated 2 November 2005
Webmaster - Jim Paterson