Molly's Blog - 3rd June 2011

Hi everyone
What a week it has been – there’s not much downtime in my life at the moment, even though I’m not doing any rallying right now!  Obviously I have been busy at work, but the absolute highlight of the last week has to have been spending a day with Robert Reid. It was excellent. He was the co-driver for the late, great Richard Burns, including during 2001 when they won the world championship and the two previous years when they were runners-up.  He’s been helping me with my pace-noting technique and I have to say it was really valuable experience. It’s not every day that you get a chance to work with someone like that and I am so grateful that he could find the time for me. I learnt a huge amount, as you can imagine – now I just have to put it into practice!

From there it was off to my role as spectator at the Jim Clark Rally. It was good to watch the quick boys at work but a bit frustrating, too, not being amongst it. I really wanted to do the event to get some tarmac practice in before the tarmac WRC rounds in Germany and France later this year, but am looking at some cheaper ways of getting that experience! And that’s what I’m working on at the moment. The little green Fiesta is being put into tarmac spec as I write this and we’ll be going testing as soon as possible.

One other interesting thing that I have been doing this week is playing tour guide for a travel story in a magazine. It’s coming out in a few months (I’ll tell you when, just as soon as I know for sure), but they wanted me to talk about Cockermouth and this whole lovely area, and the sights I would take my Aussie friends to see when they come to visit. It was a bit of a challenge because they wanted some photos too – and I don’t usually have photos with me in them! But it was kind of fun too, because it made me think about some of my favourite places here.
I do miss home a lot, but this is a pretty cool place to live and there are lots of great things to see and do. Just don’t rely on me to be tour guide because I realised I don’t really get much time to play tourist any more!

Talk to you again soon.   Cheers Molly
PS. And please, let me know what you think of the new website. I’m really thrilled with it, but I’d love to know what you think, and if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see.