It’s been a hectic two weeks! After Rally NI we flew to the Czech Republic on Sunday and met with the Proton Team and our team-mates for the week Niall McShea and Marshall Clarke.

They had spent the Sunday testing and setting up their car and were happy with the set-up and handling. On my first time sitting into the driver’s seat of a Proton on Monday(I had been in the co-drivers side for a test spin in Ireland last year), I instantly felt comfortable in the car. With relatively little effort and some help from Niall McShea we had the car set-up to my liking fairly quickly. 

Then we had the recce and that was fairly intense as there was quite a bit of mileage involved with 9 separate stages to cover. When we did shakedown on Friday morning, it was wet and all our testing had been done in the dry. The set up that we had been so happy with was useless, and the car was very difficult to drive.

We had to start setting the car up again and we did not have enough time to get it right so when we started the rally we were not entirely happy with the handling.

We continued to make some minor adjustments and by service on Saturday we had a pretty good set-up.

I felt very comfortable in the car then and on the next stage we were 5^th fastest and only 2tenths of a second from 3^rd place on the stage. That was followed by a 7^th place on the following stage, but we were very close to the fastest times and we were beating many of the IRC regulars. On that 7^th stage I had an overshoot where I had to handbrake on the escape road and rejoin the route and we were only 11 seconds slower than the fastest car.

I genuinely didn’t expect to be so close to their times.

Then on the next stage all our good work was undone, when near the end of the stage we came around a right hander and there was gravel all over the road that had been pulled out by the later cars on the first run. Had we known it was there, we would have been going 20km slower to allow for it, but the car just headed for a bridge wall and I managed to avoid that and head into some bushes instead, but we went down along a river bank and ended up in the riverbed. Rally over!

I also injured my wrist and it was late that night before I knew that there was nothing broken, only badly sprained.

If it wasn’t for my wrist we could have rejoined the rally on Sunday under Super-Rally rules, but it wasn’t to be.

My more immediate concern is to be fully fit for the Trackrod Rally in Yorkshire on 25^th September where I will be trying to retain my British Rally Championship crown.

Although I had a very tiring couple of weeks I thoroughly enjoyed them and am looking forward to Yorkshire and in the future, possibly further drives in the Proton.

 Keith