Tag: Winter Trial

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 [...]

Today the men were separated from the boys. We had a very full program on Winter Trial 2012. The roads were very tricky due to alternating wet, icy and dry surfaces. One 911 driven by a WRC crack team folded itself around a tree, some of our friends got threatened by an angry farmer, but all of us came home with a smile on our faces.

If you didn’t keep pace today, you were sure to make a steep drop down the leader board, because there were so many opportunities to lose point you wouldn’t believe it. The terrain here in Slovenia is quite rough and there were several outstanding opportunities to launch yourself into a 700-metre abyss. We gracefully declined those invitations, but a Jag just ahead of us got dangerously close.

The tests today were a lot of fun, but driven on dry surfaces. This means [...]

Today was a tough day… We managed to climb 8 positions since yesterday, but there is no rest for the rally driver!

We ran our regularity in the morning and came out feeling invincible. As we headed South to the next stage we missed a turn to the Time Check. I still remember looking at Kenneth Tjon in his 1976 924 Porsche taking a right and wondering why he went the other way, as he looked at me, wondering where the heck I was going… The short end of it was : we weren’t paying enough attention to the road numbers!

Each year we have a “driver, follow that road-moment”. The co-driver decides there is a large stretch on a single road coming up and tells the driver to keep going straight. As Joost was doing his mapping work for the [...]