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Rally Barbados
2010 - Event Overview Following
the build of Kickastra Evo III, the car was debuted at the Dark Hole
Speed Event. The handling was not the best, and we suffered
from gearbox problems - 3rd gear dogs among other things. The
gearbox was rebuilt with 3rd gear, 6th gear, the crown wheel and
pinion and diff bearing being replaced. The
car's next outing was King of the Hill - the "shakedown"
and seeding event for Rally Barbados. After a reasonably good
time on the practice run, I succeeded in rolling the car very gently
at about 3 MPH. In spite of this, we managed to bend every
panel on the car as well as smashing the windscreen so badly that we
were not able to take further part in the event. This
then set the stage for 6 days of mad scrambling to get the car ready
for Rally Barbados, starting with dropping the car at the bodywork
man immediately after the event so he can start straightening the
roofline over the front windscreen to accept the new glass. A
new windscreeen was sourced on Tuesday and was fitted on Wednesday
after Andy (the bodywork man) had done some "dressing up"
of his initial straightening. There were then a number of late
nights/early mornings to fit the new navigator seat, sumpguard, door
mirrors, kill switch cable, and relocation of passenger lap belt
mounting eye. We managed to also squeeze in a wheel alignment
and a spanner check. After the drama, we were ready for Rally
Barbados (with a few hours to spare). Onto
the rally itself. Jonathan arrived on Friday afternoon and
took ownership of pace notes written by nephew Dominic the previous
day. RB10
Day 1
The car felt ok generally, but the handling was definitely
off. A variety of adjustments in the course of the morning to
the rear shocks improved things somewhat, but it still wasn't quite
to our liking. More to follow... RB10
Day 2
The second stage of the morning looked to be wet, so we took the
slicks and put on wets (RA-1s). The stage turned out to be
pretty dry, but the tyres made a huge difference the handling and
the feel of the car, so we decided to leave them on for the rest of
the day. The confidence level was much better, and the times
reflected this. Apart from the lurid moment braking into
Kendal corner from 100+MPH on a freshly sprinkled road and narrowly
missing ploughing into the crowd who were blocking the escape road,
the day was relatively uneventful. A spectator noted that in a
L-R-L-R combination of corners, the front wheels were less than 2
inches from the curbs on each cut. Navigator Jonathan
confirmed this during the rally, remarking that the edges of scenery
were often approaching uncomfortably close to the extremities of the
car, indicating absolute full use of the road and grip. Result?
There was one!...First in class, a welcome result after last year's
RB09 retirement while leading the class. Provision
results available at this
link. More
details to follow... Adrian
Linton
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