My WRC Safari Rally 2023

[J4MIE]

All sorts of recce cars are being used, Land cruisers, Octavias, Evos, Imprezas.

We have an Evo 10.

[seb_sh]

cool that you are taking us along on your adventure, best of luck!

[J4MIE]

Well an adventurous day. Fan belt shredded itself 3km into first run of Loldia at about 10am. Urgent call made to service crew who had been told to be at service between 10am-12pm to collect the tracker. Unfortunately as seems to be the way with this team, they are an hour late for everything and there’s no such thing as a rush. They got to us at 1.45pm and took half an hour to change the belt.

So we set off not for the next stage which we would be too late to get into, but had to reroute around the other side of the lake to get in from the other side. Thanks to me being brilliantly organised we got there with what I thought was just enough time to do two runs. We got to J28 (square left), about 800m from the end and the new fan belt went too!!

It turned out that some of the bits of the old belt were still in there and so the replacement had just fallen off. Without tools we would’ve been stuck but luckily one of the few competitors who stopped to offer help (car 31 Piero Cannobio) gave us a few spanners and we were able to get into the bottom pulleys and with a lot of effort and squashing one of my fingers, we got it done in an hour or so.

So too late to do another run, but managed to get across to Sleeping Warrior. I really hate this stage, the roughest one especially the lava field on the last 5km. It was trying to rain as it was getting dark towards the ebd, but we made it through ok and no car issues!

So another frustrating day (I had to walk away on Elementeita to find somewhere to have a good scream, and accidentally disturbed a herd of zebra ) but hopefully we have a bit more luck on tomorrow’s stages.

[becher]

Well an adventurous day. Fan belt shredded itself 3km into first run of Loldia at about 10am. Urgent call made to service crew who had been told to be at service between 10am-12pm to collect the tracker. Unfortunately as seems to be the way with this team, they are an hour late for everything and there’s no such thing as a rush. They got to us at 1.45pm and took half an hour to change the belt.

So we set off not for the next stage which we would be too late to get into, but had to reroute around the other side of the lake to get in from the other side. Thanks to me being brilliantly organised we got there with what I thought was just enough time to do two runs. We got to J28 (square left), about 800m from the end and the new fan belt went too!!

It turned out that some of the bits of the old belt were still in there and so the replacement had just fallen off. Without tools we would’ve been stuck but luckily one of the few competitors who stopped to offer help (car 31 Piero Cannobio) gave us a few spanners and we were able to get into the bottom pulleys and with a lot of effort and squashing one of my fingers, we got it done in an hour or so.

So too late to do another run, but managed to get across to Sleeping Warrior. I really hate this stage, the roughest one especially the lava field on the last 5km. It was trying to rain as it was getting dark towards the ebd, but we made it through ok and no car issues!

So another frustrating day (I had to walk away on Elementeita to find somewhere to have a good scream, and accidentally disturbed a herd of zebra ) but hopefully we have a bit more luck on tomorrow’s stages.

Sounds like a dream to many around here still.

[J4MIE]

Here are a few photos I got today

[seb_sh]

Can anyone recommend me a website I can upload and share photos on to here? I used to use imgbb but seems to have stopped working

https://imgur.com/ should work

[Paul Hudson]

Keep the reports coming about your adventures, it makes interesting reading.

[J4MIE]

Recce Day 2:

Slightly less manic. Again warm and sunny so was quite hot at times in the car, and lots of dust around so no opening windows. Some folk doing recce should be ashamed, if we catch someone’s dust and have to slow to a crawl, don’t drive around us and cause more dust issues. Idiots. Overtaking us 100m into Hell’s Gate, wtf is that about.

Anyway, recce was good and our previous notes worked really well, so much so we only did a single pass and it was great to finish early afternoon giving us some time to relax. We had one puncture in Kedong after hitting a rock hiding in some grass, but otherwise no issues apart from a HUGE scare is Oserian when a Water Buck jumped out of the trees right in front of us on a 700m long straight I screamed - how we missed it I’ve no idea. Malewa very rocky and rough, I’d say the worst of the rally.

With scrutineering we had a few small issues with the car, including of course the roll cage padding and my flag… And also to my surprise my race suit validity expired end of 2022 - I like to pride myself on knowing the rules inside out - it is the right standard, is on technical list no 27, however as it was made before they started adding a hologram label, it’s not good enough. So my mistake not to notice this change and should’ve sorted out before I left. Very thankfully a friend of a friend drove over an hour in this evening’s rain to bring his across to lend to me, so I owe him many many beers…

So getting those last things checked at 9am to finally pass scrutineering.

Then pretty much straight back to Nairobi. We aren’t doing shakedown after everyone else destroys the road. As we are non-priority, we have the choice of doing the recce of Kasarani tomorrow afternoon or Thursday morning. Normally I would say Thursday morning is better to then drive competitively a short while after, but as the car was rebuilt over the last week we think its better to go tomorrow and hopefully make sure everything is working properly, plus means a later start on Thursday.

Then tomorrow evening to be spent going over the notes and checking some bits of video.

Will be glad when the rally starts.

Some pics to follow.

[J4MIE]

[J4MIE]

Passed scrutineering after another few issues and “discussions”.
We were meant to already be back in Nairobi to recce the super special in the rally car, but we’ve been messed around by the transportation company. So trying to make yet more last minute arrangements, and recce will have to be in the morning.