PEDLEY RALLYING

The second event of the year was the Horiba D’Isis Stages on the 5th April, organised by Quinton Motor Club. The event was based at MIRA (Motor Industry Research Association) at Nuneaton in Warwickshire. The team on duty this time was the two Chris’ as usual, Bob senior and Chris junior’s cousin Richard.

After arriving at the venue, we proceeded to scrutineering, catching up with old friends in the queue. Scrutineering and documentation was completed without problem and we returned to service to await the start. We had time to wander across to the side of the first stage and immediately were blown away by the speed of the 6R4’s, a hard act to follow with our “Baby Metro”
We had a start number of 58 out of 65 starters, and as we approached the start line, the expectations began to rise. The length of the stages was longer than Chris had ever driven the car in one stint so apprehension was obvious. As soon as the light went green, the car felt good and Chris was driving well, halfway through the stage, with the engine revving past 8000 rpm, the car began to run extremely hot and the engine developed a slight mis-fire, so Chris backed off to make sure we made it to the end of the stage, unfortunately on the last corner, the engine cut out and wouldn’t start again. Due mainly to the tremendous efforts of the marshals who pushed us halfway down the last straight, when she fired up again, we finished the stage just in front of the stage closing car.
As we reached the passage control, the engine again cut out and we pushed the car into service. As soon as the engine had cooled down, she started up without any problem and we headed off to stage two, with the same result. This pattern continued as far as stage four when this time the engine wouldn’t restart and we had to retire. The most annoying aspect of the day was that we didn’t know exactly what was wrong with the car.
After returning home it was three weeks before we actually tied the problem down, after lots of head scratching and changing all manner of components, the guilty party was a faulty crank sensor.