Melvyn Evans Motorsport Tour of Epynt Rally, Llandovery, Wales, March 7-8 2015
The Epynt
Rally is known as the traditional season-opener for the MSA Asphalt Rally
Championship and we were particularly keen to get started at this year’s event as
we need to start defending our title as winners of the Group N class in 2014! As
you’ll read, the rally was run over a nail-biting seven stages where every
second counted – but we finished with a very pleasing end result, if not a
complete gear lever ….
The
Epynt Rally was based at the Castle Hotel in Llandovery and the route consisted
of approximately 80 special stage miles over seven stages, with one central
service area in a quarry on the Epynt military ranges.
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| Photo courtesy of 90right.com |
We
had a successful recce on the Saturday in glorious sunshine and were pleased
with the day’s work and happy that our work in this area is improving. We
returned to the Castle Hotel for noise check and scrutineering, and the car
looked really well following a full re-spray and rebranding.
At the
6am start next morning, the sun had gone and we had a day of persistent rain,
low cloud cover and very misty conditions ahead of us. However, we had a fantastic
start on stage one finishing seventh overall and first in class - the very wet
conditions suiting our car and Mathew very confident on the pace notes.
Midway
into stage two, the yellow flags were out and we slowed down. Half a mile later
we were stopped as the unfortunate car 43 had crashed out in a big way and
destroyed their car. We waited for quite sometime to allow the medics to attend
the driver and co-driver (who were both OK) and for the recovery team to remove
the wreckage. We then drove the rest of the stage at normal speeds and received
a nominal time, which put us down to 28th o/a and second in class, seven
seconds behind the new leader.
Stage
three and we set 11th fastest time which moved us up four places to 24th and
gained five seconds on our class leader which meant only two second splitting
us going into stage 4.
Stage
4 was a re-run of stage two, and this time we were 17th fastest and 20th O/a
but, crucially, took nine seconds out of the class leader which now gave us a
seven seconds lead with two stages remaining.
Stage
five, we set an 8th fastest O/a remained at 17th O/a but took a massive 30
seconds out of our nearest class rival which gave us a 37 seconds lead going
into the remaining two stages.
Stage
six and conditions were drying however we decided to stay with the wets, which
was the safe choice but probably the wrong one. We also snapped the gear lever!
However, we managed to change gears with just the bottom 3 inches of what was
left and only dropped three seconds as a result – remaining class leader and 17th
O/a.
A
confident run through stage seven - albeit still with the broken gear lever – we set
15th fastest stage time which moved us up one place to finish the rally 16th
overall but, more importantly, to win the group N class and get maximum
championship points on the opening round of the championship.
We
then had a short run back to the hotel and a quick interview with the nice
people from special stage review and motoring news.
One
last concern popped up, when the provisional results were posted and we were
not on the list of finishers. But it transpired that there had been a mix up
with the time sheets and the computer assumed we had gone over our time limit.
The mistake was easily rectified and we were back on the final results and picked
up a driver and co-driver award.
All
in all, a great result – thanks again to the team and all our sponsors.
