Category: Winter Trial Rally

The day started on a good note with Team TwinSpark on P5 in Club class. The field of about 50 cars in our class had suffered a blow in the regularity ran in darkness yesterday. We had found the correct route and from four regularities we emerged with minimal penalties.

It was good to see Cooper and Rene in the 911 Targa had made it back last night at about 11, after 4 hours of downtime in the wilderness before they could be found back. No damage to the car and unbroken spirits for that team. Today they tried their luck again on a snowy track and ended up in a ditch. This time it happened on the main route though. Thank God the Mercedes of Fer d’ Arnaud was close behind and he managed to pull the 911 Targa 2.2S free.

We just arrived at our hotel in Weimar after a day with 170 km of highways to get to the East, mixed with three tests at Twente Airport and four 15km regularity section. A good day to get back into the rythm, because the regularity sections were set on icy, snowy side-roads. Lethal conditions as even one of the Irish competitors, Frank Fennell, who does nothing but rallying, drilled himself into a ditch a few minutes ahead of us. Not something we could fix, but definitely a nice job for the rescue crew with a 4×4!

Our test this morning consisted of three sections and included icy, snowy and asphalt sections and it was a hoot as usual. We had two small misses, which cost us a few seconds, but where last year we had many offs due to abundant risks being taken, this year we [...]

After an exciting morning running regularities through Western Slovenia, we all made it to the finish line in Trieste, where we were greeted by organiser Bart Rietbergen and his wife Jolijn, I can honestly say that I have never experienced the kind of cold we have here at the moment. The wind is blowing from the East over the Adriatic at hurricane speeds and the wind chill factor must be minus 25C!

This morning’s roads had more holes than a Gruyere cheese. Anything loose in the car danced around as though gravity had dropped to Moon levels. Should you need to recover from a wrong turn early in a stage, doing 90km on these twisties shows you where the weakness in the car is. None were found.

We have yet to find out the official results of the rally, but [...]