Why I... co-drive rally cars
"There’s always that fear at the back of your mind that you are going to crash, that you’re going to roll into a ditch, or go off a fresh air bend."
I got into rally driving about four and a half years ago when I met my partner, the former British champion rally driver Bob Gibbons. I’d always liked going on the back of a motorbike – I like all that wind in your hair stuff – so I thought “this’ll be a laugh”.
On the day of a rally, there are a number of stages that you have to drive. So, you might do four stages of, say, four or five minutes each, going one way and then you do the same stages going backwards.in the afternoon. And there might be 120 cars. My job, as the co-driver, is to get the driver to the start of the stage on time, making sure he doesn’t go into the control ahead of the stated time. Part of the job is very technical.
You have to be able to multitask on about a million levels. You’ve got to be up to speed with the stage notes, making sure you know, in great detail, where the bends, humpback bridges, 90 degree slots, and hairpins are, so that you can tell the driver what’s coming up and he can set the car up correctly.
You’ve got all this whizzing by at around 100 MPH while you’re reading the notes, which a lot of people can’t deal with because they get car sick. You also have to watch the traffic lights at the stage start because there’s a ‘five, four, three, two, one’ countdown, and you’ve got to tell them to GO!
Trust between a co-driver and a driver is really important. And, at the highest levels, the co-driver almost has to read the mind of the driver and vice versa. They’ve got to be so in-sync.
I have been fortunate because Bob has been driving for years so he knows many of the stages well. But they move things around, so you’ll go through a chicane – right to left – and then the next time round it’ll have changed to bales of hay going left to right. You’ve got to remember because, if you set the car up wrong, you could hit something – HARD! Luckily, we’ve never crashed while I’ve been in the car.
When I first got in the car, it was quite scary. Your heart’s racing all the time. There’s always that fear at the back of your mind that this time it might not end well. It’s not a drive in the park, people get killed. It’s serious.
You get a very uncomfortable, claustrophobic type of feeling. You’ve got to have a whole fireproof suit on and proper boots. You’ve also got this huge, heavy helmet on with something called a Hans device which is like a heavy bra which is attached to your helmet to stop whiplash. Then there is a tight seat and a five-point harness. You are completely rigid and can’t move much.
I have done some driving too, but not competitively. I did my training in a Subaru up at the Phil Price Rally School in Wales, so have a proper driving licence. Throwing the car around and going into corners broadside was just fantastic.
I do it for the challenge, I do it for the adrenaline and I do it for the fun. When you’re in the car, you can’t think of anything else – it’s totally and utterly absorbing. In a way, it’s a form of meditation because you’re shutting your mind off from everything apart from the task at hand – which can mean the difference literally between life and death.
I’m very much a big picture person in the world of financial planning. I’ll have the big ideas for the clients, and other people will implement them, look at the detail, and get the technical stuff right. But when you’re co-driving, you have to have the detail and understand the technicalities, so it does, I guess, focus my mind on the importance of making sure that the small stuff is right, as well as having the big picture idea that we can go fast and have fun.