Happy New Year?

The new year is only 14 days old and already we've suffered setbacks!

The original plan was to give both cars a run out at Croft - the Escort for the Christmas Stages and the Metro for the Jack Frost. Unfortunately, as with even the best laid plans, things have gone slightly awry...

The continuing issues with the Escorts clutch meant that we decided not to risk taking the car out until we had a chance to give it a proper shakedown. With this in mind we opted to look at entering the Riponian Rally instead. However, when the car was taken out for a test drive it was discovered that the clutch pedal itself had suffered damage at some point - this means that we have to refabricate the connection between the pedal and the clutch cable. With the extreme cost involved for a small team like ourselves to enter a forest rally we have therefore decided to give it a miss for now and have a run out in a single venue event instead. Watch this space to find out where and when!

The Metro went in for some welding doing before Christmas and suffered a minor mishap on the way when I discovered that I hadn't fastened the wheel nuts on fully. This came to light when the wheel fell off the car damaging the wing in the process! Anyhow... the car finally made it to the garage and had the welding done and went in for it's MOT and promptly failed. Two pieces of work needed to and have been carried out to get it through the test - a new piece needed to be fabricated to fasten the front wing on as this had been damaged at some point and basically rusted away, and the car needed a new rear radius arm fitting. These have been done and the car is in for the re-test today.

So the end of '07 and the beginning of '08 have brought a few niggly problems that will hopefully be pretty simple to iron out over the next week or two. We're looking to give the Metro it's debut at Manby at the end of February and the Escort should hopefully be out and about around the same time.