Report on LCC's Pothunter Rally 2003  –  by The Maestro

There was an unfortunate date clash between Lanarkshire’s Pothunter and Highland’s Autumn. Three factors made me opt for the former.

First, it is closer.

Second, it was to be run by the most experienced navigator currently competing in Scotland, Neil Turner, who, incidentally, won the same event in 1996 when it was the Inter-Association rally challenge, run by Peter Martin. Despite very wet conditions and a sick car I thoroughly enjoyed that one; but that is another story.

Third, the Autumn has gone a bit stale in recent years. It has had the same organiser since I first did it in 1995, and you lose enthusiasm and run out of ideas after you’ve been running rallies for a few years, and that’s when things start to decline.

I don’t have a regular partner this year, as Stuart Naylor is trying to do some driving, so I usually offer myself to the organisers as either a driver or a marshal. If they want me to drive with a navigator of their choice I will do it. Or of course I am always open to offers from my own friends too.

This time I got an email from somebody I hadn’t heard of, Peter Weall. I had no idea of his previous experience, or anything. It was only a few days before the event that I found out he had entered us in the Open class. I met him at the start. It turns out he had done some rallying a long time ago, and had gone away to England to work, only to return home a few months ago, and get back into rallying at the same time. He still knows lots of LCC people. He had done one other event this year prior to this one, after about a ten-year layoff, so he warned me he might be a bit rusty. No problem, I said, as I am used to having a variety of navigators, having taken out lots of first-timers as well as experts.

Sure enough, he was a little bit below peak performance in a couple of ways. His stomach went on strike, but despite this he managed to give me the important information, while I was left to read the road myself most of the time. And when he did manage to call bends the descriptions were sometimes a little vague.

But we managed to clean most of the route. There was one section where the clue didn’t seem to work, and we ended up making a guess. Our only opposition in the Open class, Euan Brodie and Oly McCollum, in a 205 GTi, did the same, but it took them a minute longer and we arrived at that TC ahead of them. Advantage to us!

In the second last section we ran into a serious PR problem. The route plotted on a white that went through a farm. We met Euan and Oly coming back out the way we were going in, but we didn’t have a chance to speak to them. A few seconds later we discovered the problem when we were approached by the farmer, who was not amused. We decided to return to TC14 to issue an alert to the other competitors via the marshal at that TC. We succeeded in stopping anybody else from going into that farm. We had to risk dropping time, and indeed we did. But we reckoned that a sensible organiser would accept our reason for doing it, and would scrub time penalties accordingly. He did. He also had to scrub the code on the white.

Neil had given us some specific instructions on how to treat certain triangles. At the first of these I think a novice driver would have failed to notice, and Peter was miles away. However, any experienced driver, if he sees a triangle, instinctively rings an alarm bell. Thus was our trust and rapport cemented.

The only other thing of any consequence was the patchy fog, which, when combined with some of the rough roads and dodgy surface conditions – it almost looked and felt like frost in places – made the driving tricky some of the time. Oh yes, and the distinctive Lanarkshire tar mustn’t go unmentioned. If you see a red surface you must be in Lanarkshire!

So – and yes, I’ve kept you in suspense until the last paragraph – we won!! If that’s rusty I’d like to see Peter on form. I may yet achieve this, as we’ve agreed to do the Fife Circle together. Watch this space.

Updated 21 September 2003
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