Tag: Historic Rallying

Under grey skies we entered the Black Forest, where we encountered the first heavy snow cover.

Gorgeous landscape and great driving roads. Somewhat icy remnants on the road made for fingertip handling of the steering wheel to nurse Silverado downhill. We ran three regularities today and had a few misses which were partly recovered. The field was very close after yesterday, but today the last regularity seems to be keeping many people busy, as it’s somewhat quiet in the bar. Here’s a link to some video:

Winter Trial 2012 Test 1

We took off in 24th position, due to my mistake on the first test, but because the first day was not very challenging, the field was very close together. We had 5 minutes between number 1 and ourselves. In this rally damage is usually measured in hours in the end, so we plod away and hope to make fewer mistakes than others.

To avoid [...]

And then its all over, but what a result: after several attempts our sympathetic Dutch racing driver Gijs van Lennep wins The Trial. With British co-driver-navigator Iain Tullie the team took top honors with a minute to spare after 6 days of intense rallying in their 356 C, owned by the State of Art collection. I spoke to Gijs several times before this event and his concerns that another technical problem would strand him in sight of the finish line were countered by rigorous preparation of his car. Engine and gearbox were rebuilt and Gijs felt the car ran wonderfully this time around.

The combination Van Lennep/Tullie was new to the event, but Iain had won the event several years ago with the late Malcolm Pickering, so he knew what he was up against. I asked him after the event how he had prepared [...]

We had all sorts of weather today on our Marathon track from Krems in Austria to Linz, via Budweiser in The Czech Republic. We drove 485 kms on farmer roads mostly, only partly cleared of snow. The wind was howling and the fresh overnight snow was blowing back onto the road after the morning snowplow runs. This meant we had the trickiest conditions of the week to contend with. One moment the road was clear and the next you wrestled with a snow bank.

This morning during our first regularity many cars ahead of us decided to put chains on to get up the first hill. We rather relied on the rear-weight bias of the 911 and let the 2.7 RS engine’s torque do its work. This strategy delivered us 20 minutes advantage and warm hands….

A Lancia decided to return in its tracks this morning as we were driving on a [...]