A new adventure for MiniSpares Historic crew Peter Horsburgh with regular navigator Anthony Preston embarked on a foray into Belgian “Regularity“ rallying last weekend in their Mini Cooper S (277 BRX).

We were accompanied by one other British crew Geoff Twigg and Graham Carter in their immaculate Alpine Renault A110S, against 66 local crews .

The event contained two night sections and 6 loops of day sections on closed road special tests starting at 8pm on Friday till 11pm, then restarting on Saturday at 9am and running without halts until 11pm on Saturday night !

We did have a service crew (Spencer and Sean) which was at the centre of the figure of 8 day loops with between 5 and 10 minutes for service.A new adventure for MiniSpares Historic crew Peter Horsburgh with regular navigator Anthony Preston embarked on a foray into Belgian“Regularity“rallying last weekend in their Mini Cooper S (277 BRX).

We were accompanied by one other British crew Geoff Twigg and Graham Carter in their immaculate Alpine Renault A110S, against 66 local crews .

The event contained two night sections and 6 loops of day sections on closed road special tests starting at 8pm on Friday till 11pm, then restarting on Saturday at 9am and running without halts until 11pm on Saturday night !

We did have a service crew (Spencer and Sean) which was at the centre of the figure of 8 day loops with between 5 and 10 minutes for service.

The event started badly with no clutch at the end of the first test on Friday night .Fortunately the service crew was at the end of the test ,but it took us about an hour to diagnose a faulty slave cylinder and fit my spare which was seized through damp storage in the spares box ! We got going and rejoined the route after cutting out a large chunk of the Friday night section dropping us to 34^th overall with little chance of improvement on Saturday. However we were keen to show what we could do and gain experience of tests run to an averge speed of 65kph (40mph) with secret timing points mid test through a timing beam. The car went well thro the day and we had reasonable penalties comparable with the top ten Belgian crews.

The night started well with a test and a normal British type regularity section which we did only dropping 2 seconds .By this time it was getting dark and we set off on what was a typical night road rally with tight section timing and many passage controls and plenty of gravel “whites” to slow you down. By 10 pm with one hour left to go , we had passed a number of cars and were still clean and no missed PC’s ,then the head gasket failed and we had to nurse the car 20kms to our B&B gutted not to make the finish and prove we could be in top ten contention ,ignoring Friday’s disaster.

Our compatriots finished in 20^th overall having been as high as 14^th during the day but missed a couple of passages during the night.

A great experience , rally disappointment made up for by a great welcome from the Belgian crews ,good food and excellent “Jupiler” beer a large quantity of which we brought back!  We will go back for another try next year.

Peter Horsburgh  24/09/2012