More Happenings

For Christmas my lovely girlfriend bought me a full day Rally experience at Silverstone Rally School.

Oh you ask, how did that go?

It went very well thank you, after a journey that was more "interesting" than it needed to be (navigational issues), we had a welcome chat / safety briefing from one of the instructors, & then were split into two groups. first was turning left - rally style, so handbrake turning & power sliding. The car handling one group went anti-clockwise round a section of the rally course, while the other car pirouetted left round two cones. each person had three goes each, which was good because the reasons why it all went wrong tended to filter out while I was waiting for my next go. Actually not much did go wrong, against all probability I kept the car out of the trees & off of the cones.

Ah yes, the car, a generation one Subaru Imprezza, converted to rear wheel drive & with a welded diff, no idea about the engine, but there was no turbo whine or whoosh & I would imagine a basic 1600 would give as much power as a novice would want, it was certainly nice & responsive.

Following the turning left, we did a lot of turning right & I started to feel I was getting the hang of going sideways, the next exercise was a short rally stage where we were to turn left AND right putting into practice what we'd learnt, this meant I couldn't just drive with one hand on the hydraulic handbrake & pull it as required I had to steer properly & find the handbrake as required. I felt it went OK & my instructor praised my preciseness (it didn't feel precise as my feet tangled & by arms flailed, BUT I didn't hit any banks or cones, so that's good enough for me. Then it was lunch time & about half of the cadre (who were on a 1/2 day course) left. 

After lunch, there was an explanation of rally pace notes & then we sauntered back out to the cars to drive more of the course while being instructed by the instructors. This too went remarkably well, twice I loused up a sharp left hand handbrake turn (naturally directly in front of the viewing terrace), but the third one went better, my speed was improving & as long as I had sufficient track width I was reasonably confidently sliding the car round corners, leaving satisfyingly billowy clouds of dust.

The final item was a "free for all" with the instructor telling me which way to go at the various junctions, now that was great fun, but 48 years of road driving was making it's presence felt. at one junction where I was supposed to be gracefully drifting the car to the left, I switched the indicator on! next time round I felt myself instinctively looking for other traffic! On another occasion approaching a corner "at speed" & hitting the brakes hard & sharp to get weight over the front axle I went to change down a gear.

At the final de-brief, my instructor held my certificate until last & referred to me as "Dr Precession" because apparently I got the car straitened out & set up for the next corner very well - it didn't feel like that at the time, but I was moving relatively quickly, didn't spin & didn't stall, so I'll take the complement.

Thanks go to my girlfriend for buying the experience for me & taking these pictures.

So overall a fantastic day's driving / learning. At 65 I'm not going to be taking up competitive rallying, but I do feel that the course will improve my driving out on the moors on our road trips, the instructors were very good, commendably brave & the cars were exactly what I would've hoped for, fast enough to be fun, docile enough to be controllable & very easy to drive - well, if you're used to a simple rear wheel drive car that is, some of the younger ones seemed to be struggling a little.