An Event

4th March 2015

I went to a Sporting Trial with the car on Sunday (March 1st, first day of Spring). It was held at Bolton Abbey, near to Skipton. My passenger for this outing was Lord Claymore of  Fylde. (Not really. That's his forum name on another forum. He is called John)

On the trip over using the A65 I caught up a Windermere club member towing his car so settled down to follow him. He is  a happening dude so I thought he will know the way. Sure enough after joining the A59 around Skipton instead of carrying straight on the main road which leads fairly directly to Bolton Abbey he darted off at the next turning, to Grassington.
"Ah, his SatNav must know a better route" I thought, and followed on. After about 5 miles he pulled in. I stopped and he came back and said "Hi Phil, do you know where this place is?"
Doh!

I got there a bit later than planned. Claymore was already there. Interestingly, the Suzuki SX4 coped very well towing the loaded car trailer into the quagmire that was the field entrance.
I chose the route carefully to avoid the 6" deep muddy ruts and just pootled across to a downward-facing slope to make exiting easy. I only have cheap road tyres on the car.After sorting out the signing on and scrutineering we went for a bit of an amble up some hills to get settled into the new office. The car is left hand drive, the fiddle brakes on my left, so it is a bit different from the last car. Claymore had to get used to the exposed nature and "perching" feeling of leaning out of a little open car. He's done motorcycle trialing before.

I must say it was very gratifying that after almost exactly a year away from competing people were coming up to me and welcoming me back at every turn. The reverse side of the coin is that many people reminded me that the RayBax has been previously been a very effective car, which that didn't put me under any pressure. Actually it didn't, as I am well aware that my driving skills can overcome any inherent advantage the car might offer and leave me spinning wheels without any problem.

The trial got under way badly for one competitor in our group, Rob. As he turned up to reach the first Hill his wheel fell off. The whole lot, hub and everything.
Walking the Hill showed it to be very rough with lots of loose and not so loose rocks. I'm not very good at avoiding rocks so was glad I had fitted a sumpguard and a guard for the clutch slave cylinder.

Hill 1 wasn't a huge success. We got past a couple of posts on the way up . However I did notice others having the same problems.
Between Saturday when Brian Thornton laid out the course and Sunday it had rained heavily. So the course had changed from being a "trickling" course, where you use as little power as you can manage to a "blasting" course which requires full throttle and maximum wheel spin to dig into the sludge.

Things didn't look good. The guys with the bigger (max 1650cc), tuned engines would have an advantage over my 1335cc Honda standard lump.
It carried on quite like that for Hills 2 and 3. Hill 4 was much better as it was tighter,  going into a gulley and turning up and over a small crest with a sharp left uphill. That caught us out as the fiddle brake needed was on the uphill wheel and being lightly loaded and upset by the crest, it didn't turn the car as much as I would have liked so we clipped (demolished) the the "7" post on both morning runs.

Hill 6 was much better with a bit more opportunity to gain momentum. We just managed to get up the first rise with lots of wheelspin, some bouncing. The only thing you can't do is roll backwards or stop for more than 3 seconds.
Then we got further round the course and set up for a straight blast up the Hill. We got good momentum and were gripping well when one of the iceberg-like rocks hiding in the mud took a hand and we hit it with the front axle, the car rode over it and we were stuck perched on top. The car had actually torn it from the ground. The rock had been rolled under the car.
Marshalls and other competitors came to help us off. In reality we only needed to reverse off the rock with a bit off weight over the back axle to provide grip. The rock turned out to be the size of a leather pouffe, but less resilient.
Bryan, who I bought my first car from said "Bloody hell. Didn't you see that, it's like Table Mountain?"
In truth I didn't see it as a hazard, it was more on Claymore's side and the bonnet hump sort of obscured it. Bit of a shame really as we had good speed at that point.
I have a very bad record with rocks. I have driven over lots of them. That's why I put guards underneath.

We set off for the next Hill  (after taking a very steep shortcut down a bracken covered bank, where we bashed over.......more rocks).

The second runs through the Hills gave very similar scores, but as the rain had become a snow blizzard, the ground was much wetter so we actually improved our performance but just maintained our results.

A tinkling noise alerted me to a problem and sure enough the water pump had started leaking with a fine spray coming off the drive pulley. I had water and a towel so we managed to release the rad cap and top up. This allowed us to carry on, with another refill later. It's things like this that you only discover in the white-heat of competition. I could have ambled about for hours without it failing.

On the way back to the Hills from the pits I remarked to Claymore how the front wheels didn't do much steering. I was using the fiddle brakes to keep going the way I wanted on the track.

Come lunch-time we considered the prospect of the afternoon run. I thought they would reduce it to one run at the Hills, instead of two, as the ground was getting very sludgy and it was pure power that was getting cars up the sections. They would alter the course to provide new ground, but that would be OK for the first cars and then sloppy for every other car.
Quite a lot of cars had packed up already (there were 26 entries).
The possibility was that we would overheat the motor and blow the head gasket if we continued.
Then Bryan noticed the front axle was not actually at right angles to the car's centre line. A bit of inspection showed that the lower suspension bracket had received one hell of a clout and bent (which we had known at the time) but hands and knees inspection revealed the bracket had been torn apart with a crystaline fracture of at least half it's cross section.


You can see an un-modified bracket at the far end of the axle

This shows the distortion

Closer shot of the split

This was more important (and explained the steering vagueness) It wouldn't actually be curtains if it broke on a Hill, but it would be bloody difficult to recover the car to the trailer, without a front axle in place.

So we decided to pack up.

We had a look at the only afternoon run and I'm glad we did pack up as the going was even worse. In this video the mud is winning.

(Click on the four little brackets on the bottom right of the video to view Full Screen. 

Click "esc" on the top left of your keyboard to get back to the blog)

Back at base the damage to the sumpguard is obvious

The sloping line between the springs

Gouged by the rock. It did the job and should straighten easily.

So. not too bad a day out. If it had remained dry we would have done better and probably finished the event. Still down near the bottom. But the purpose was to try the car and see if anything I'd done to it was not working properly.

Claymore seemed undaunted by the weather and said he enjoyed the event. Whether that includes my rather cavalier attitude to car control I'm not sure......