Alastair Vines and Peter Moss are entered into the Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique (car 282) http://www.acm.mc/ which will start on Wednesday 26th January and finish on the 2nd February 2011 in Monaco. Nigel Chetwynd and Simon Wheatcroft will provide back up to the team tackling running repairs, refuelling and maintenance throughout the event. The team are attempting to raise £10k to support their entry and raise money for the charity Bliss http://www.bliss.org.uk/ which concerns itself with babies born too early, too small or too sick to fend for themselves. They have to date won the backing of sponsorship from Mini Spares http://www.minispares.com/ and Norton Insurance http://www.norton-ib.co.uk/ and continue to seek more help with funding to secure their ambition. If you would like to help please call Alastair Vines on 0776 437 7322 or email to crx89b@blueyonder.co.uk
The period immediately after Christmas and into the first two or three weeks of January is one of the very busiest times for preparing for the rally. A myriad of activities are all coming together; finalise the car specification; shake down runs; develop spares packing list; agree service car schedules; route recce by team members in France etc.
Since our Boxing Day drive the car has been in our garage for much of the time receiving final adjustments to specification. My friend Paul Price, who is one of the last remaining Lucas Racing auto electricians from the 1960s and who worked on the BMC competition Minis in the old days, spent Thursday 30th December with us going through the wiring to ensure that all was well, and to add an additional relay into the lighting circuit. It took me until after the weekend to put the car back together again!
On Bank Holiday Monday 3rd January our service crew, Nigel Chetwynd and Simon Wheatcroft spent the day with me working on packing our spares boxes and finalising the shopping list of parts that we will need to go out and order. We also took the opportunity to fit improved competition full harness seat belts, fire extinguishers, improve the air horns, an additional ignition coil, and save a bit of weight by removing the bumper over riders.
On Tuesday 4th January the roof light came off to save more weight, and on Thursday 6th I took the car out to do some fuel consumption checks to further develop our refuelling plans on the rally.
Argh**!?Bxxx - The speedo cable snapped almost immediately - so back into the garage for a new cable. I am however pleased that this happened now, as a speedo cable failure on the event means that hope for a good result in the rally is effectively over. Changing a cable is a horrid job at the best of times, and this one proved to be especially difficult - so I managed to incorporate a few tweaks to make it easier next time.
In the period Tuesday 4th and Thursday 6th Willy Cave and Peter Moss, navigators for cars 273 and 282) flew out to France to conduct a recce of the route. They did a fantastic job and drove every competitive section plus some of the other trickier parts of the route at least once, making detailed notes as they went along. This work is vital in order not to get lost, and to provide important information to stay on time whilst in the competitive sections of the rally.
Yesterday, Saturday the 8th Peter Barker (Car 273) organised a day at Coventry University for the Mini Cooper Register Rally Team to come together to discuss tactics and areas of mutual help and assistance. We had an excellent day sharing our experience of prior Monte Carlo rallies with new team members, clarifying rally rules and proceedures, going over Willy and Peter's recce notes, and agreeing common service point locations and resource sharing.
"The Master" - Ex BMC Works Team navigator Willy Cave (Navigator car 273) describes the Valence / Valence section whilst Nigel Chetwynd and Simon Wheatcroft (service crew for car 282) check their maps.
There is still much much more to do. We urgently have to get more miles on the car to shake out any further problems , check our lip to lip fuel consumption, set up our distance measuring equipment, prepare winter wheel tyre assemblies, order our spares parts, raise more sponsorship monies - only two and half weeks to go before we leave - phew! It is getting very exciting now.
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Great stuff --is the Peter Moss involved the former owner of a Lotus Elite in 1969!who i spoke to at Silverstone a couple of year ago
ReplyDeleteI know he was involved with mini coopers.
If so it would be good to make contact again --my e-mail is roger_garrett_brown @ yahoo.co.uk
Just a chance!