Molly's Blog - 12th May 2011

Hi everyone,
Well, I’m back at work after what turned out to be a very difficult birthday weekend. Thanks for all the good wishes for my birthday and for the event, which proved to be very, very tricky.
Obviously I’m extremely disappointed not to come home with a result. It was one of those events with lots of little things that can catch you out – and where the small mistakes have big consequences.

I wasn’t the only one having dramas – there were so many other people in the same boat. It seems hard to believe that eight or nine of the Fiesta crews came undone on the same rock but it doesn’t really make it any easier. You just have to learn from it all. Maybe I under-estimated it. I don’t know, but I do know that it has made me more determined. I realise I need to step up another level and this has made me more focussed for the next WRC event, which is Finland at the end of July.

Before that, we have the Jim Clark, which is round four of the British Championship. That’s happening at the end of this month, and it’s a tarmac rally so it will be good practice for the WRC rounds in Germany and France, which are both tarmac rallies.
There is a rally in Estonia I’d like to do before Finland as we have a very long gap between events, but it will be budget dependant.
In some ways there is an argument for doing fewer events but choosing the more demanding ones, and the Estonian event is one of those, although it is hard to get to. There’s not much point doing what might effectively be a club round for the sake of getting some more miles under our belts, when there are things that we can do without even getting into the rally car that will sharpen us up for the next WRC round.
I’m talking about getting out and practicing writing our notes and then really fine-tuning our system, and watching all the in-car footage and analysing it and learning from it. There are so many aspects to doing a rally at this level and we just need to get better and better at all of them.

Mollly Taylor No. 115	We got some air!

We got some air!Anyway, that’s the plan. In the meantime, I’m catching up on about a week’s worth of work at work, and then at home I’ve got my giant whiteboard with a steadily growing list of “chores” – rally chores, that is, not housework!Another of the things on the list is a plan to get some more money together so we can do a bit more testing, but that’s not an easy one to tick off – I need to get the brain working a bit harder on that one!

I must say that I don’t want to sound like the weekend was all gloom and doom, though. Obviously it was just fantastic having Mum over here. She was so much help to both of us, but just getting to spend time with her was great.And even our enforced ‘lay-over’ on day two, while we waited for the recovery vehicle, had its positive points. We sat around for about six-and-a-half hours, but we managed to end up at a picnic area where about forty Italians were having a get-together and watching the rally.
They had minimal English – but maximum food. All this cheese and wine and an incredible lamb stew with onions and potatoes and vegetables, and they gave us big helpings. The pot of stew was huge – there were complete animals in there (offal and all), probably a couple of lamb’s worth of meat in the pot!They were all drinking wine, and after lunch they just passed out on the grass and had their afternoon siesta. We weren’t drinking but we had a little siesta too. So the upside of not finishing the rally was a great opportunity to meet the locals and get up close to the true Italian culture!
Have a great week.  And make sure you visit my Photo Gallery to see some pics from Rally Sardinia.