February 22nd, 2014
Snowman
Several crews were out today on the Snowman Rally, under the ‘Team SOSCC’ banner. This season opener is always well supported, as the field is swollen by a couple of dozen hopefuls from all over Scotland who set off at the beginning, thinking “this is my year” but find out it’s not even their day !.
Nonetheless, here in our wee corner of Scotland, we can take plenty of positives out of todays results for SOSCC crews, with one possible exception.
David Bogie and Kevin Rae celebrated a win on last weekend’s Wyedean Rally and would have hoped to continue in the same vein, but one front tyre had other ideas, deflating nine miles from the end of an early stage and costing lots of time as they didnt stop to replace it. Lesser cars might well have broken under the extra pounding this flat gave the car but the 02 Focus held up and the pair can, on reflection, be happy with fourth overall, just 52 seconds behind winner Euan Thorburn, having made up a shedload of the actual time lost due to the puncture.
Greg and Chris McKnight unveiled their Mk II Escort here and had an up and down day, particularly with the throttle linkage that started to fall off, dropping them into the seventies. Nonetheless, they clawed their way back up and took 55th overall and will no doubt have ideas of how to improve their very smart motor before round 2 of the SRC, the Border Counties. Here Greg’s view of things ; “We set out to do one thing, get a finish!. And we did that, but a pretty disappointing finish. Stage one was very slippy. I drove the second half of the stage thinking I had a puncture!. Was lying 33rd and third in class, 6 seconds off the class leader Ian Wilson, then in stages 2 and 3, we lost about 10 minutes with the throttle linkage popping off. Had to stop quite a few times. Got to service, fixed that and went back out on stages 4 and 5 just for seat time and to try and enjoy the rest of the rally. We managed to climb back to 55th and 10th in class. The car went great all day, apart from the throttle linkage and was great fun. Never mind, got the Border Counties to look forward to”.
Jim Robertson and Colin Maxwell had, in Colin’s words, a ‘bad day’, with several contributory factors adding up to a non-finish.
Scott Sloan and dad David took the class winning Crorsa to Inverness, having spent the winter sorting virtually everything on the car and were rewarded with 51st overall. The results are definitely improving and here’s hoping the budget stands up and they can complete the full SRC, although the tarmac Jim Clark may be dropped from their itinerary. Here’s Scott’s short report. “We had a difficult day, firstly with the windscreen steaming up on stage one where we couldn’t see a thing and had a seriously close call. So we then just calmed down for stages 2 and 3. Unfortunately we got a puncture in stage 4 and drove about six miles on the front right rim, losing a lot of time. We were therefore pretty surprised with 3rd in class and happy to finally get a finish and not damage the car. Now looking forward to the Border Counties.”
Here are Frank Love’s pics.
