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At last we have managed to seal a deal to contest the 2008 C2R2 Cup. Matt Cotton & co-driver Anthony Godden will join us in our championship quest. You can find out more about last years Silverstone Stars Championship runner up at CG Motorsport.
Because of the last minute deal we are planning to get Matt out at Barton Stacey on the 12th of April to get him some time in the car & are looking for a venue near Carlisle for a shake down prior to the Pirelli.
Phoenix Stages Chris Hellings 1st Class
Lucas Hunt 6th Class
North Humberside Dominic Hodge 3rd Class
Next outing for Ti will be this weekend at Swansea for the Red Dragon Rally where Richard Phillipson will once again use his Honda Civic.
We are still waiting for our gearbox to be sorted by the makers neither at present able to do anything but deny responsibility.
Having made the most of the Birbeck establishment we made our way into Whitby for the 9 o'clock start. Amazingly the weather had cleared & we had sunshine of all things. BTRDA allow management cars so Stefan's Golf was once again commandeered. Service was to have been at Abbey fields but as everything had got stuck in the mud the organisers managed to persuade the local council to let them use the nearby council car park. The only problem with that was that over 100 cars were trying to service in an area good for about 50.
The event format was 3 stages with management after 2 & 3 followed by 40 minute service then repeated, with management after 5.
At first management service we had our only drama of the day. The radiator had come out of its mountings & was sort of fully floating. The crew were happy with the car but a little disappointed with their times but were holding 4th place in the Rally First class. At the end of stage 3 the temporary repair was holding so we followed the car into service.
Investigation of the radiator problem points to damage from the Lombard Revival that we missed when we got the car ready and although safe enough the strain had broken the top mount so this will be something we will need to look at. Tyres were swapped front to rear and the car spanner checked but apart from the radiator everything else was fine.
Stages 4 & 5 were trouble free with Dominic taking 10 & 7 seconds off his first times despite the arrival of the forecast rain. He was however going backwards compared to the othersin the class.
At the end of stage 6 we waited fairly anxiously for the car to arrive and eventually Dominic & Stefan arrived still complaining about how slow the car was up hill [its a stock 1400 Dominic] but we had a good finish with no problems & points on the board.
On the way back to the finish we had the text results & we had actually climbed to 3rd in class so even better.
Certainly a very encouraging start with a liitle bit more power from the car & a little more from Dominic & who knows.
In order to give Dominic some time in the car we arranged to use Chris Birbecks facility at Saltburn to shake the car down & to arrive at a suitable suspension setting. Also on hand to try the car was Tony Simpson who will use the car on the Pirelli in 3 weeks time.
Conditions were pretty grim but as the forecast for Saturday wasn't great we just made the best of it. Our revised struts & rear dampers proved to be brilliant, we had based the rates on the R2 dampers and they seem to be spot on. Apart from softening the rate on the rear both drivers thought we were good to go for Saturday. I must say that the car handles superbly and certainly rides the bumps well.
We are however a little bit down on power so that will be the next item on the development program
The great thing about Chris's place is that they have a hotel as well as a workshop so we were able to pressure wash the car & give it a quick spanner check before heading into Whitby for scrutineering & documentation.
Scrutiny posed no problems and with our 6 Yokohamas marked we were back to Birbecks for the night.
Challenge Points after Round 1
Chris Hellings / Andy Hellings 100 points
Shane Kielthy / Brendon Kielthy 90 "
Graham Webb / Andy May 82 "
Jonny Williams / Simon Atkinson 75 "
Chris North / Tony Derrick 70 "
Lucas Hunt / Stefan Arndt 65 "
1400 Champions 2006 & 2007
The opening round of this years 205 Challenge certainly proved entertaining but the weather was awesome and I am sure contributed to a lot of the carnage on the event. We had everything from sunshine to snow, hail, rain gale force winds and a lot debate about whether you were better off on tarmac or gravel tyres.
Stage 1 saw Andy Chalmers take a commanding lead, I thing he was about 12th quickest overall, or own Chris Hellings who was co-driven on this occasion by his father Andy was second with Lucas on his very first stage 4th.
Stage 2 ended Andy's hopes when the ignition module failed leaving him stranded on the stage, Chris put in another quick time to give him a nice buffer with which to defend first place. Lucas once again had a clean stage and moved up to 3rd place. Shane Keilthy was also well on the pace and will be someone we have to watch as the season progresses. 
Lucas, seen here on the left was certainly enjoying his first outing, with dad Richard on hand to offer encouragement. Co-driver Stefan who had got up at 3.0am to get to the start didn't seem to be flagging but like the rest of the competitors couldn't understand why he had left a nice warm bed to freeze to death in the middle of nowhere.
Chris and Andy were pleased with progress so far and were enjoying a bit of reliability which had eluded them last year. It was very satisfying to see how well Chris was handling the unusual pressure of being leader of the pack.
Not so kucky was Sam Jones who managed to roll his 1400 and was soon putting the remains on the trailer.
Stages 3 & 4 passed without incident, Chris & Shane matching times and enjoying a really fine battle, a mistake on the 2nd stage by Shane had given Chris the buffer to take some of the pressure off though not enough to let him relax. Lucas meanwhile had started to drop time, and before stage 6 I asked Stefan to maybe give him a bit of a push.
What a mistaka to maka. First I knew was when Darky came over and said "its not too bad". I thought he was on about one of the cars he was running, but oh no. Lucas had joined a load of others who on the day had put their cars on their roofs.
As soon as the car got back to service, series scrutineer Dominic Hodge came over to check the car and to make sure that damage was in no way going to compromise the crews safety. Having checked the roll cage and the rest of the car we were given the all clear to get the car ready for the next stage. We had about an hour and a half to get the car ready so no major dramas. While I checked Chris' car Andy Tearle who until then had had very little to do other than to add fuel started removing broken glass, fixing covering for the missing windows & generally sorting out the mess. I am told by Stefan that shortly before Lucas had asked him what it was like to roll. Now you know.
An accident on stage 7 meant a very long delay and stage 8 was cancelled so it all came down to this stage. When Chris came in he was told to go to post event scrutineering and while we were there Shane came in. Both drivers were so anxious about times but once again Chris had edged Shane, just 1 second this time but enough to give Chris & father Andy the class win & first pot of the year.
Well done everyone. Lucas by the way finished 6th
1400 Champions 2006 & 2007
Our own Dominic Hodge is no 1 seed in the BTRDA Rally First Series starting next weekend at Whitby. He will start no 213 in the Silverstone Tyres 1400 Championship. 12 cars are currently due to start pretty evenly split between 1400's & 1000's.
Although the main 1400 field use Silverstone tyres the Rally First crews have a choice and we have done a deal to run Yokahama's AO35's same as our 205 Challenge guys. For this championship you are only allowed 6 tyres per event.
The car has now been log booked and now we have a load of stickers from the BTRDA which should make it look a bit more like a competition car.
With North Humberside just 2 weeks away there is a lot of activity around our 1400 challenger. One of the main jobs being to bring the car up to MSA standard for stage rallying. 
We shall once again use a Cartek cut out system as this has been so easy for us since we started using them, although they can be a bit of a bind if the battery is flat as they trip out all the time.
Following on from the Revival Rally we now have a much more positive location for the strut top mounts & the revised struts should give us the travel that we need. The struts provide 20 click adjustment for bump/rebound.
Rear ride height is also adjustable courtesy of natty threaded units which go over the original locations on the rear beam and give us up to 2" of movement. Rear dampers are also 20 click adjustment.
OMP bolt in cage needed the extra bars for the seat belts when in Enduro form because the rear seats made it impossible to anchor the belts in the floor. Otherwise it is a really nice cage & fits nicely.
We have started a bit of a development program on our 1400,s. A standard TU XS should produce 85bhp according to Peugeot so our target has always been to gain about 5% without spending too much & keeping the engine 100% legal. We have had no problem with this but now we are looking at a 10% increase, again without any big spending & this week we saw 93 bhp for the first time. This is the engine we first built to use for Paul Darks 2006 car. Trying to find a few extra brake is becoming more difficult especially without spending any extra money but just detailing what we have.
Having optimised our timing & fueling at Power Engineering + Tuning's rolling road we will probably look at the air intake side and try to make sure we have clean cold air whenever possible.
Current figures
Lucas Hunts 89 bhp @ 5825 rpm
Chris Hellings 93 bhp
