chunkymonkey

yup, he got us at the first uphill hairpin right on errochty. had that pic on the front page of the website for a while. car should look smart this season as we have just facelifted it to the later classic model. not sure of seeding yet, but expect mid 50s maybe? my other car is likely to be much higher up if it is running. would be great to see that out too.

Rogie hasn't run since 2006, and it was double usage then, so it was in a shocking state come the afternoon runs. Should be good this year, though seems to be starting in a different place. Central service all day at Muir of Ord is great too. So who's your other half's brother then???

so, anyone coming along to the above event? should be a cracker with 5 great stages included. i'm out in the yellow impreza again and hope to have some english hot shot out in the white bugeye hire car for the day. looking forward to it!

thanks for that. you had me worried!!!! i'll hire it for anything so long as its suitably insured beforehand, or a bond provided against it. my partner in crime, Tim Finch will price up any deal on any event, so give it a go if you want to.

meaning what Davie? i've got the original V5 here with Prodrive as the first owner. am i missing something???

the hose from the top of the struts is connected into the gold canisters which are part of the suspension damping.

plan at this stage is to continue with the classic meantime, and its just been facelifted for the new season. we will then hire this new one and the classic on any events i'm not doing, to recoup a bit of the outlay, then do some testing after the season and see if i like LHD or not. will then see what the options are after that. to be honest i love the classic, but thought this was too good a price to pass on, given that it was probably a £60000 car when prodrive finished building it. if anyone is interested in either car for any event then we are open for discussions!

sit your BARS test, and cross my palm with silver and of course you can!!

over in Ireland yesterday, taking delivery of this lovely piece of kit. prodrive build group N bugeye, and in a previous life was used by Tommi Makinnen as a recce car. going to be available as a hire car for the rest of the 2009 season, via Tim Finch Rallyesport, who runs my other car.

looks to me like they are too soft, and i'd recommend not fiddling with the geo until you have tried the pressures first. i got 30000 miles out of a front set of Dunlop Sports on my A8 and when they came off the outside edge was like yours only slightly worse, but the inside edge was down to the canvas you would have sworn that the only way they could have got like that would have been for the only part of the tyre in contact with the road to be the inside edge. quite amazing. got told to add 4-5psi to the next set and check the wear after 2-3000 miles and see if it had made a difference, and it has. much more even wear now, so i'll keep checking mine. no point telling you what mine are set at, as they are 255/40 ZR 19s, but the wear issue is almost identical to yours. Don

seems to me that there are 2 scenarios you either need harnesses for competition/track use, or you are putting yourself in harms way, in same cases for purely cosmetic reasons! sorry, but that's my take on it. if you are serious about your safety then using harnesses in any variety of home made, badly thought out, clip em and go operation is probably more dangerous to your health than a standard lap and diagonal belt. many have said you feel safer and put on race faces and drive in a more unrestricted fashion. i think if you do that without them being properly fitted then you delude yourself into thinking you have more protection than you have. come on chaps. harnesses are designed for competition use in an appropriate environment. if they were such a good thing for road cars then we'd all be driving around with 4 point seat belts now. they aren't, and we aren't so unless they are fitted at the kind of angles the FIA mandates, and on solid seats then you are more at risk than you think. any ideas how your life insurance of health insurance company would view a fatality or a disabling accident in a car fitted with non standard seatbelts?? and before you start with the fact that they may pass an MOT test that won't stop them trying to wriggle out of it. also, anyone got any experience of how your car insurer views the fitment of non standard belts? i asked mine and was quite surprised by the answer!

sorry, but not quite sure what you're getting at? point i was trying to make was that if you look at the harness from the front, the way it sits once fitted, is such that the buckle will sit slightly higher up your body than the point where a lap belt would sit across your body. therefore you are likely to have more of a gap to go under a harness than you will have to go under a lap belt. a lap belt can almost sit along the line of a belt you'd wear across your jeans, whereas its not usual to see a four point buckle sit that low, if for no reason other than the fact that it is flippin uncomfortable! a lapbelt will be a straight line across the body looked at from the front. a harness will look more like a 'V' and an upside down 'V' meeting at a buckle. the strain from your upper half of the body will likely as not pull the buckle even further up, and you can slide under - exactly what happened to me, with professionally fitted and measured rally belts in 2006. that's why my last 3 rally cars have all had crotch straps. sorry if i've not understood your point, and if i have the copy the two statements that you want to me to reconcile and i'll do my best.

didn't say you could, just said that you had more chance, as opposed to no chance if you're strapped in tight in an upright position in harnesses in a car without a cage to absorb some of the force. when i have mine on properly i can't move from the back of the seat which is great with a lid on, and a roll cage inches from your head. harnesses are not designed to be an integral part of a road car, so i think you take a risk putting them on. also, as i said before, if you're going to the hassle of harnesses then 4 point are a waste of money in a sudden deceleration as you run the risk of sliding out from under them, as i nearly did the only time i've ever needed them. assuming of course that the downwards force doesn't crush the seat back and break the frame if the energy is heading down towards a rear mounting point lower than the height of the harness holes! most harnesses will sit slightly higher up your body than a well placed lap strap. with a normal belt in a sudden deceleration you'd have a little bit of upper body movement, then be restrained by the cross strap and the lap strap. if you are in tight in a 4 point harness the upper body will stay put if you are in tight, so the forward energy transfers to your one point of escape - under the belts. quire scary, to be honest and every rally car since has had 5 or 6 points, as don't want that risk again.

i'd avoid at all costs unless you have a securely fastened harness bar across the rear of the car, or are using it in conjunction with an aftermarket bucket seat with fixed mounting points. if you think of the forces you would exert on the back on a seat with a moveable back as you went forward, and the force went down through the seat due to the fact that the fixing point at the rear was lower, then the strain on the seat back runs all sorts of risks, which you don't have with a standard seat belt. they are fine in a rally car or track car, but imho that's where they belong, and harnesses with standard road seats is a dangerous combination. as has been previously mentioned you have little wriggle room in a harness in an accident, whereas there is more chance you could duck down in a roll with a standard belt, and avoid the corner of the car coming in on you. they can also be dangerous if not securely fastened and if you are going the harness route they are not worth having if you don't have the crotch straps as well. in the rally car you pull them so tight you can hardly breathe. that's when they'd work best. even at that the only off i had was in an Astra without crotch straps and i partially slid out from under them. harness+helmet+aftermarket fixed seat+rollcage = best combination anything else = more trouble that it's worth, even if it does makes you feel like Colin McRae once you are strapped in.

fog lamps should only be used in fog, and when visibility is reduced to less than 100m. beyond that they add nothing to your driving visibility anyway, and just make you look like a chav. driving with them on on a clear night, in rain or in snow is just antisocial in the extreme, and a friend of mine got pulled by the cops in London and got fined £60 and 3 points for having them on in the rain