Three of the four cars we drove.

Sunday 27th August 2000
Another early start as we headed out to Maramarua Forest. When we arrived everything was ready to go, we had four different cars to drive, two front wheel drive cars, and two four wheel drive cars.

After a small briefing, we got our selves geared up and waited for our turn.

The roads we were running on were still quite wet from the night before, so we were all a little nervous at the prospect of trying to drive fast in these conditions, but as it turned out the day was to stay fine and the roads would dry out quite a lot by the end of the day.

The 'circuit' that we ran is known as Mc Robbies Loop, and is used by the World Rally Championship teams to shake down their cars before the International rally of New Zealand. It is quite a tight course with a few traps here and there that you have to watch for. As none of us wanted to cause any damage to any of the cars - we all decided that being very cautious (to start with) on our first runs was a good way to be.

We were lucky enough to have some very good tutors sitting in the co-driver's seat with us, it was great to be able to tap into the knowledge of Marty Rostenberg and Chris Ramsey while driving along the forestry roads. These guys really know their stuff and it was of a great comfort to us rally novices to have these guys letting us know what was coming up on the course in front of us.

The start of Mc Robbies Loop.

Throughout the day everyone got faster and faster, and confidence levels lifted quite high. What was fascinating was the differences in the way the front wheel drive cars handled compared to the way the four wheel drive cars did. The front wheel drive cars were a quite direct and responded pretty much instantly to steering input whereas, the four wheel drive cars seemed slower to turn in but handled beautifully through the turns and were very easy to control. The brakes on these cars were just awesome!

We managed to get through the day unscathed and then had a turn in the co-drivers seat while either Chris or Marty took us for a ride. Man, what a ride! We thought throughout the day that we had been traveling at resonably fast speeds, but these two were just unreal, it was hard to believe that you could take corners as fast or brake as hard into them. The day is worth it is just for that one ride..........

So all in all, a fantastic weekend. We would recommend the rally school to anyone who may want to try rally driving. The tutors are all great people and the driving is an experience that is hard to forget.

Stevie and Cliff would like to thank Chris, Dale, Colin and Marty for an awesome weekend. They'll be back!

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