PC9 (12 Car)

Organiser's Comments

Congratulations to Jon & Calum for the PC win, and commiserations to Dave & Elly who'd have taken it from them if an angry local hadn't forced the abandonment of the sections after TC9. Ben & John also did well on a challenging event, and Chris & Toby were going well before they were stopped after TC9. Andy & Gareth, and Carl & Lizzie were also stopped by the same people, who seemed to think the police should have told them about the event - can't imagine how they thought that would happen, the police HQ can't even tell their own patrol car drivers about events, as Olly will testify. The three crews stopped did well to defuse the situation & placate the resident, who ended up apologising for spoiling the competitors' evening. To put things in context, it was just before 10pm when he stopped Lizzie & Carl, and up to that time only 5 rally cars had been past that point anyway. Of the other eligible crews, Olly & Ben seemed to have a bit of poor night but kept battling away, and made sure they got all the TCs. It looks like Olly enjoyed many of the LWR deltas - we could see his tyre marks (we'll blame him, anyway) when we were collecting the codeboards. Phil Davidson (on only his second event, I think) and Ali Macmillan had all sorts of problems with the nav, but kept plugging away regardless.

Of the non-eligibles a slightly geenish-grey Phil Kendall did an excellent job navving Tom round the whole route in good time, and their result would've looked even better if Tom put a bit more effort into stopping at give-ways. Susan did very well navving Andy with the more challenging NE nav, to the extent that they exactly equalled Jon & Calum's performance. Jonah & Dick tell me they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, but that `under time pressure we just ended up guessing solutions and made lots of mistakes.'

Sorry that two crews (one in each class) found the nav too challenging and decided to retire - although it wasn't meant to be an easy event, perhaps it came out rather harder than we intended.

Many thanks to all the marshals who turned out - driving from as far afield as Warwicksire to lend a hand. All the TCs bar one were manned. Unfortunately Matt Hall found navving the course closer to be more of a challenge than he'd expected, but the boards they weren't able to get were picked up later anyway. Thanks also to Paul Lettington for all his input setting the event, including a number of return trips to Reading at odd hours, and for sorting out the clever electronic stuff like timecards and the very high-quality map fragment, courtesy of the Streetmap website. Finally, many thanks to Len at the Milbury's for stretching the rules a bit to ensure that all finishers and marshals were able to get a drink, whatever time they rolled in.

Steve