Longmoor Loco - Dec 30th.

Right there will be me and some bloke called BertMk2 any one else going to be there?
It's MoD land as in an Army camp that has all but closed for Xmas so NO spectators.
But is a good little event to marshal.
Mr Bert will spend the day riding round in his arm chair, while I am keeping an eye on things with the MSA radio.

:) It'll be the first event for our new car so hopefully it'll last the day. We're not going to have much time to give it a proper shakedown before the day though :(

The entry list filled up in a week so it's popular with the crews and it's usually very competitive at the front. The only way to see the action is as service crew or get out there and marshal - go on, you know you want to :)

Well, we made it but only just :)

In the week leading up to Christmas the car just needed a few small jobs doing to it - including repacking the exhaust and getting the noise down from the 104db reading we got at the Lydden sprint. So, it was taken down to Ashford to get that done - on the way back a horrible knocking noise developed in the engine and sure enough, totally borked. It looks to have been an oil pickup problem and the end result was damaged shells on number 1 & 2 and lots of bits of metal floating about where they shouldn't be. Christmas Eve saw a trip to SBD with the spare crank and a big wad of cash, the crank was checked over and declared ok along with all new shells (again). The car was back up and running on Friday night, all the other jobs were done on Saturday afternoon/evening and the car was loaded up (cutting it fine somewhat ;) ).

We got through noise and scrutineering no trouble and we were then just hoping the car held together and we got to the end of the day. Stage 1 saw us clobber a kerb that severly deranged the steering, by the end of the stage the front wheels were pointing in opposite directions. That got fixed in service and from then on the car ran without any major problems (steering wheel nut came loose on stage 7 and saw my driver trying to tighten it on the straight bits - and there aren't many of them at longmoor!).

So we made it to the end which was a fantastic result given that two days prior to the event the car didn't have an engine. There is a lot of setup work to do as well - the engine dramas prevented us having any sort of shakedown. The afternoon stages saw us really on it and we were clawing time back from people all afternoon, we also managed to scythe through the traffic quite well although I did seem to spend most of stages 7 & 8 with my foot on the horn to get people out of the way ;)

We eventually finished 9th overall and second in class - that was our best ever result and entirely unexpected after all the trouble with the engine. Even better - we beat the crew we were down there with by 5 seconds :)

I didn't catch you down there Pete, whereabouts were you on the stages?

Not bad at short notice then well done.
Did see you or the car while I was on my way in you were going to scrutineering, not sure if that was you or your service crew.
Time was very short in the morning so had to find my post PDQ.
They were doing the radio check ready for the stewards at 0815.
Had a walk around the service at the end saw the van but you weren't there.
For the first four stages I was on post 1 the 90 right just after the start, then after the turn round I was on post 11 the hairpin right, both times parked just on the left.
Didn't realise the car was sign written so wasn't sure on the way in whether to shout 'Burt' as I hadn't looked at the entry list to get your name D'oh!
Yet again a very good event.
Trouble with that event the radio man is in the venue fitting radios to course cars, so we have to wait to sign on leaving about 30mins to find out where we are and get there.
So your off the hook till next time.;)

:) That'll have been me on the way to scrutineering, we normally take the car through ourselves (my driver built it so he can handle anything on that side whilst I keep track of the paperwork - can't trust drivers with paperwork ;) ).

How did the car look around the hairpin in the afternoon? We'd had trouble with hairpins until we adjusted the handbrake, it worked a lot better in the afternoon.

It was a cracking event again - I've done Longmoor for the last 4 years and it's always been good fun, we should be back again at the end of the year for another go :)

All the Escorts looked good round the hairpin, but must say you looked like you were on it, couple of times I thought you had forgotten there was a left just after it!!
Can't see you on the list for SDS @ Goodwood or are you on the reserve list?
Next time will make a point of meeting you, couldn't believe you had loaded up before I had chance to get to you at the end.
Maybe it was the young lady from car 19 that held me up, well she got to be better looking!:rofl:
Even though we didn't meet it was good to have someone you 'know' to watch.
All the Best for 2008.

We're not entered for Goodwood - the plan was see what state the car/engine was in after Longmoor before committing to another event (the years budget has already been largely used thanks to our various engine dramas, if we had a problem at Longmoor then there's no way we'd make Goodwood.

We loaded up then headed over to the prizegiving :) first time we've ever won anything! (although I did get a pot with a different driver on the Tempest last year). My driver keeps on threatening to trade me in for a better looking co-driver - I did point out though that if he had an attractive co-driver he wouldn't pay any attention to the driving side of things ;)