Saturday 15 October 2011

Rally - Mid day mullings

There’s no change to the overnight results (see previous Blog) but I spoke to Neil MacKinnon, the faither of rally leader Paul ‘Buzz Lightyear’ MacKinnon who is leading the rally. Apparently the problem with Paul’s frequent engine stalls last night was down to a sticking throttle body: “We found the cause at service last night,” said Neil, “and we fitted new bodies this morning so that should cure it.”

“He’s driving well,” said the 12 times Mull winner, “that’s Kenny’s (McKinstry) own car that I used two years ago. It’s taken a while to get it right again after its wee bump, but it’s quite a car.”

Also spoke to Dougi Hall this morning out taking the dug for a walk along Tobermory Main Street in the rain and asked him what happened last night: “The gearbox is fine, the car is perfect,” said Dougi, “it was a roller pin the gear selector that broke. A 20p part cost me the run. And looking at the results this morning, things would have been looking good for me today.” So he’s a wee bit disgruntled, he’s not had a lot of luck on this event in the past but he keeps coming back.

Andrew Wood and Ronnie Thom had a busy night in the tyre vans last night and they are still going hard at it this morning. After last night’s unexpected mild temperatures and dryness a lot of folk were looking for harder tyres and now they’re looking for wets. It’s not raining hard here at present, but the drizzle is constant and persistent. There’s also a lot of new tar on sections of the roads so it’s going to be awfy slippy on this afternoon’s Leg 2 of the Tunnock’s Mull Rally.

Andy Rowe didn’t last long last night. The alternator belt came off on SS1 and tried to get through SS2 but “it conked out.” Haven’t seen John Rintoul as yet but he was having braking problems early on last night before his retirement. But this is a brand new EVO8 and it’s first time out, so it lacked a bit of mileage and development. Bruce Edwards in the Tupperware GT is not on the pace, but the Darrian was never built with these roads in mind. The tyres were too hard last night and with such a light wee car he just wasn’t getting any heart into them.

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