Molly's Blog - Pre Rally Finland - 25 July 2011

Hello everyone

While everyone at home is shivering through winter (I heard from mum how wet and miserable Sydney has been), I’ve been enjoying the long summer days of Finland – it’s daylight here until after midnight, and I’ve had to hang some blankets up at my window so that I can get to sleep because it’s daylight again at around 3am.  The long days are really productive though because we can get a lot of work done in the evenings.

After Rally Estonia we had planned a casual day driving 250km north to the Port at Tallinn to catch a ferry to Finland.  However, the day turned out to be anything but casual. Having had a rally car that stopped and started throughout the rally, we then found we had a service van that wouldn’t start. Then it would. Then it wouldn’t. You get the picture...    So our first challenge was to get the service van to the closest town (Tartu) as early as possible and try and find a mechanic who might be able to fix the problem. We figured we had a few spare hours to spend on the van and still make the trip up north and make the ferry on time. But, that didn’t happen.  Seb and I went on ahead to Tallinn and my good friend Mattie drew the short straw and stayed with the van.  As it turned out, they couldn’t fix the van in Tartu, but arranged for the parts to be available in Tallinn. So Mattie limped up the highway to Tallinn with a van running on three cylinders, a drive that normally takes about two-and-a-half hours took him five.  But then the parts weren’t available there either, so he ended up taking the late evening ferry to Helsinki. Helsinki’s a big city, surely they’d have the parts there?  But no, Mattie caught trains from one side of Helsinki to the other, going to various places but unable to find the right bits.  Eventually, a rally friend lent us another van, so Mattie abandoned our van, and transferred all the service gear to the borrowed van and eventually drove up to Jyvaskyla, where Rally Finland is based.  Poor Mattie, we’d been in Jyvaskyla since 8pm on Monday night and Mattie didn’t make it there until 1.00 am on Wednesday morning!  As I write this blog, the van is still in Helsinki awaiting repair.

We’ve spent the last few days working on the rally car we ran in Estonia – my British Rally Championship Fiesta – trying to sort out the electrical issues we had that weekend.  The only problem was that we couldn’t reproduce the problem which meant we couldn’t really find what the problem was.  Seb and I also spent some time out and about doing some note writing practice, and yesterday we went testing, sharing a test road with a couple of other Finnish Fiesta’s, on a test road near one of the beautiful Finnish Lakes.  It was a really productive day. Most importantly the electrical fault reared it’s head again and we were finally able to discover the source of the problem which turned out to be the ECU. One of the Finnish Fiesta’s at the test lent us their ECU so we could continue to test, and we spent the day taking the ECU in and out, and running between the two cars, putting it back in their car, and then when they had some down time, taking it out again and putting back in our car.  The extended evening daylight here makes testing quite relaxed in terms of the time available to drive, so even though we were swapping ECU’s and having quite a bit of down time, we were also able to do as much testing as we needed. My mentor, Neal Bates is here in Finland at the moment, so it was great to have Neal in the car with me (and even more fun, because I think I frightened him!).  It was a very demanding and tricky test road which required 100% concentration the entire time which was really hard work, but valuable testing..  Mum’s here too, so you can thank her for the photos from now on, because it’s like having the paparazzi around!

During the week I also had a chance to go for a ride with Mikko Hirvonen on the legendary Ouninpohja stage last Friday. M-Sport were out there testing, and I was in the car with him for about 15km. It was absolutely unreal, it blew me away. I’m trying to get my head around what is possible with a car & driver combination like that.

Now we’re into full-on rally preparation. We have a lecture from Mikko Hirvonen today and some Academy briefings before the recce starts this afternoon. We have recce for the next three days and the rally starts at 4pm on Thursday (about 11pm Australian time). This is the fastest event on the WRC calendar, but it’s not just fast, it’s very technical as well. So with all the jumps and crests, as well as the speed, we need to make sure our notes are as accurate as they can be and that we drive to them. After Estonia we know we have good pace, but now we have to put it all together. It’s all very well to know where you are on the road when you’re on the road, but it’s important to be able to land where you need to be, and keep going after the big jumps that are such a feature here. That will be the challenge! I am really looking forward to getting out there. This is such an iconic rally and it’s pretty surreal to think I am about to be part of it.

Also, I have a new Nokia N8 phone for the week, which I will be using for video blogs to show the action as it happens. Check it out on my new facebook page: www.facebook.com/#!/MollyRally   Cheers Molly