In which Sid prepares to go out on the 2021 Roger Albert Clark rally.
Sid has been rallying since 1986, first driving a road rally Ford Escort made out of a Type 49 shelled police Panda car and a Cortina engine. The light blue paint would show through the scratches in the ICI Basic Transport White spray job. We may be able to get a picture of the only picture of that car out in the Devon lanes, Corinne Symes on the maps.
This year Sid is getting ready for November’s Roger Albert Clark Rally. This is a recreation of the old Royal Automobile Club RAC that was the UK round of the World Rally Championship, with its name wittily reusing the RAC abbreviation. This runs for five days with a certain amount of night running over 320 forest stage miles across England, Scotland and Wales. This is very exhilarating and quite tiring. It is like doing an entire championship but with all the rounds on successive days. Modern WRC rounds have about 200 stage miles over three days and are generally contested by persons of an age to have intact night vision.
In 2021 Sid and co-driver Stefan Arndt are out in a Peugeot 504, the only one on the event, built by Ti Motorsport. This is the car that Dave Gough and Sid drove to Cape Town in 2012. It has been prepared for rallying since and has been on events in Kenya. We will enter the Safari class on the RAC though it is not quite clear what that means. But as it has been rallying on historic events in Kenya that should count for something.
The Peugeot 504 was built in France from 1968 to 1983, and being a sturdy old bus was assembled from Peugeot supplied kits around the world in places where the Toyota Hilux now rules the roads. The last 504s were assembled in Nigeria in 2006 bringing the total built to over 3,000,000.
The 1,971cc engine on carbs had 96bhp. This one might have a about 140bhp on twin Webers. The suspension is Mac struts at the back acting on trailing arms (not a live axle) and coil springs at the front with Proflex damping. The car was well suited to the East African Safari and the Rally du Maroc in the day.
There is a reason why over 80 of the cars on this RAC are Escorts. Leave aside the weight, it is now normal for a two litre Pinto engine to give 170bhp (assuming it has not been taken out to 2.4 litres). BDGs now give more than the in-period 240 or so, but then a Wlicox engine is over £26,000. Cars are now breaking their gearboxes because they have over 300bhp.
We are the only 504 out there. We plan to get through the night miles and drive quite quickly to the end. We are carrying some Safari heritage in the Timo Makinen / Henry Liddon 1975 livery. Sid is not as fast as Timo was in a Mini or a 504 but has the advantage of being able to enter the 2021 event.
Our first test drive plan was to put road miles on and then see what might fall off on the stages so we drove it to Wales to use the forest stages up at the Phil Price Rally School. The car has no fuel gauge so to allay Sid’s range anxiety after eight miles we stopped to fill up. It would not restart. We looked at the fuses.
We called Ti to come sort it out. Dave turned the key. It started.
We set off and a few miles later it lost power. No ticking from the fuel pumps. Dave tried to drive the car to Race Parts in Wallingford but only made a pub car park. Andy Tearle and I picked up two Red Top and Two Silver Top pumps not knowing just what was on the car. Oddly, one of each. These were fitted after lunch (we were stopped at a pub) and off we went towards the Horse and Jockey, Knighton. All going fairly well until night fell. Could not see a damn thing. Only one of the lights was working and that not pointing along the road.
The following morning we set off for the rally school where they apologise for the roughness of the roads. They are about mangled enough. Sid has been driving FWD for years and is a bit of a schoolboy with the rear wheel drive Peugeot. On the good side: good brakes, good traction, nice LSD, stability over the yumps, quite torquey. On the bad side: no lights, long gearing, oil leaking onto manifold with much smoke, failing synchro on fourth, wipers barely touching the screen. Nothing fell off and these are all useful things to find with five weeks to go.
We now have a list of jobs for Ti to tackle and a date to go back to Phil Price for Sid to get a conversion course to RWD. Oh, and we have bought a lot of lights.
That sounds like a bunch of fun! Lights are good. Lights mounted up high are even better! I look forward to seeing a roof mounted array of LED dazzlers.
I checked the law. On main beam the lights can be as high as we like.
We are talking to the scrutineers about what constitutes Safari class on the RAC so watch this space.