Tunnocks Tour of Mull 2009 - GMSC stories

The Tour of Mull is run from Friday night to Sunday morning, on winding, bumpy, single-track public roads closed by act of parliament. The rally covers around 150 stage miles, the equivalent of three Scottish Rally Championship events in one weekend.

After a few cissy dry rallies it was back to a proper Tour of Mull this year, with the traditional pouring rain for the Friday night start, but with the innovation of two runs at a stage through the streets of Tobermory to mark the 40th running of the event.

Congratulations to GMSC-er Peter Stanhope, who received a Services To The Rally award for his work on organising and running the Tobermory stage. See the video below.




32 John and Jim Rintoul, Mitsubishi Evo 9

The Rintouls “Tunnocks Tour of Mull”……..what a Rally!!!

August and September are always nervous months for us. Mull is like the Holy Grail of Rallies to compete in, better still to finish, and even better to try and keep up wi some of the fast guys.
We’ve been working steadily to rebuild the Tarmac Evo 6 with some modern technology by way of Evo 9 Diff’s and the like, but it’s not been as straightforward as first thought. With the Mull entry in and the ‘tarmac 6’ shell still on a spit, a panic decision was made to buy an Irish Evo 8.5 Group N and stick on big brakes, struts and the FCE Chequers…..

With the car finished the week before the rally and only a ‘run roond the block’ – within the speed limits of course - we were loaded for ‘Otter and Eagle spotters’ paradise.

Recce is banned in anything that resembles a Rally car, so we were in at the deep end on a damp dark Friday evening with the first Stage along Tobermory Main Street.!!!.

Two runs through the ‘super special’ at 30 second intervals were blotted by a wee spin on the 90 left at Curry Corner – caught on ‘youtube’ unfortunately.

Friday Night. Tobermory, and Loch Scridain.




Stage 3 and 4 was a blast up Glen Aros to Dervaig with a right to Tobermory or a left for Calagary, and they were shoosters. These stages have clifftop tours with twists, turns and hairpins like the ‘Italian Job’ but just 12 feet wide. It’s 24 miles of non stop racing with ‘pacenotes’ that would make a navigator sound like a Welshman wi a stutter …..gogogoch.

We managed both these stages, though crews above 50 or so were deprived of both when car 4 Neil McKinnon left the road on a muddy bend and sped across the grass ‘into a parked van’ we heard. At least one of the crew was knocked unconcious, but they were both taken to hospital and kept in for observation.

The delay left the organisers with little option but to cancel stage 3 - however I understand some crews had planned to refuel after stage 3 and threatened to block stage 4 if they ran out of fuel – so they cancelled the two of them and had a drive through to stage 5 and service. After a nervous, cautious Friday night stages, we were up to 21st overall.

Loch Tuath, Saturday afternoon.


For the Saturday afternoon stages we had a late breakfast of raw meat and razor blades…. Aggression was the name of the game and we had a go at making up some time. We managed top ten times on most of them and moved up to 14th overall, just three seconds behind the Oggies in a wee Pug Cup car…… even after our wee off on Calgary at a tightening right 8 – which was cautioned by me – “watch this bit, we’ve been off here twice before” – so what did he do – went wide…..onto grass muck and gitters. I could only laugh, he cursed !!!! We managed back on the road without too much time lost, but later in the day the biggest accident was young Ross Hunter in car 112. He’d be flying - literally – that was his style, but he rolled several times on the downhill jumps on the same stage and wrote off his Evo!

Saturday night was going to be a best behaviour night. To have come this far unscathed, we weren’t going to throw anything away, but old eyes and a couple of hundred blind crests were a daunting thought.

We hoped to keep up wi the Oggies, our Mull Buddies ( Ian and faither Angus Mackenzie) and were lying 12th equal going into the last two stages.

We were almost too cautious and cruised into Tobermory 12th overall, just ahead of a hard charging Dougie Weir, while the Oggies slipped to 14th after their alternator failed and had to drive the last 4 miles on dipped headlights and a missfire.

A great event. Look out for us on the 2300 Club / Tunnocks Calendar.

Now we’ve recovered some confidence in Rallying with a Mitsubishi on tarmac again………roll on Crail.

Jim

87 Gordon Milne and Paul Watson, Audi TT

Gordon and Paul’s Story:

Wednesday: Arrived

Thursday: G drove car with no bonnet pins. Damaged bonnet and pride.

Friday:

SS1 Stalled at curry house.

SS2 Broke rear diff on start line. Yippee 2WD the rest of the weekend.

SS3 Cancelled for Neil MacKinnon''s accident.

SS4 Ditto

SS5 Made a hash of the blind summit, and never really recovered

SS6 Great fun (Scridain)

SS7 Ditto (Gribun) caught a car and 6 cows

Saturday

SS8 Great fun, started raining, fell off. Pushed back on, but losing brakes. Fell off again. Pushed on again, but retired at end of stage as no emergency service for another 3 stages and nae brakes.

138 Fergus Gray and Martin Jenkins, Peugeot 206 GTI

Friday Morning October 2009, its raining, it must be Mull. What tyres do we use? After much debate a quick trip to Ronnies van a full set of cut Yokies were bolted onto the car.

Stage 1 & 2 in Tobermory were very slippy and caution was the watch word, crashing out at the start of the weekend would have been more embarrassing than going slow. Stages 3 & 4 were non competitive after a long wait for the all clear after Boko’s off on the stage 4.

Stage 5 was to be our first go at a proper stage, all was going well until we landed off a small crest and everything went dark! Martin took off with the board and triangle whist I found the cause of the problem to be a melted ignition switch. Fifteen minutes later with the dashboard in bits and a pair of vise-grips pressed into service we were on our way again – quite exciting as every time I used the brakes the live vice-grips shorted out against the handbrake lever (in-car fireworks – not recommended but spectacular in the dark!)

A clean but cautious run up stage 6 Scridain brought us to a queue at the start of Stage 7 Gribun. Another non competitive run through brought us upon our team mate Gordon Halley standing beside the road with the news that he and Guy were OK but the car was no more. Having just come over the crest downhill at the phone box into the 400 straight to be greeted by a herd of cows coming up the stage, Gordon had aimed for the only possible gap to avoid disaster. Unfortunately it wasn’t there so he collected a large black cow on his bonnet which apparently made the steering slightly heavy! Both car & cow came to rest having broken the front suspension a few yards down the road at which point the recumbent bovine disembarked and returned to the rest of the herd. To add to the disaster the third car to come onto the scene clipped a rock at the side of the road and collided heavily with rear of the car in the ditch.

Saturday proved to be a better day for us and the fight back from second last on the road began. Drier roads and a new set of Dunlops let us really enjoy the daylight stages. Best of all was the run from Dervaig to Tobermory one of the best stages in Scottish tarmac rallying.

Back into the dark and rain on Saturday night for section 3, and with only 4 stages left. We gave it a go on the long one and Mishnish Lochs and set off for a finish after service. Sadly stage 15 was again non competitive so it was a long and boring drive around the island from Tobermory to Torloisk without a competitive mile. This left the last stage which was a battle for both driver and navigator to stay awake as we swept along over the shiny new tar down Glen Aros.

Fergus & Martin