You race cars, you have accidents.

Seems like a simple premise but the reality is true, no matter how careful or talented you are it's inevitable that at some point you are going to have an off in your racecar. You simply can't push the limits without occasionally going over them and the outcomes of doing so will depend to some extent on the motorsport discipline you are competing in.

I've had my share of crashes in 20+ years of club competition from clipping a curb and breaking a wheel at a hillclimb to landing upside-down on the roadside in a tarmac rally and a number of incidents in between. Mostly these are driver error from pushing the limits a bit far or perhaps a loss of concentration and in one recent case being hit from behind on track by another driver.

One of the main reasons we don't compete in open circuit racing is because of the inherent risk of damage in these events. The old adage of "rubbing's racing" means inevitable contact even if you are actively avoiding it, it's the price of doing business. Conversely, in our chosen disciplines of hillclimb, sprint and rally the onus is on the driver/crew not to crash and 99% of the time if you do then it's your own fault. I can live with that much better than being cleaned up in someone else's accident. Check the 2019 Challenge Bathurst blog for how well that turns out…

In our rally career of 16 years and perhaps 30 events we have had three off road adventures resulting in some damage. In 2006 we dropped the Elfin off the edge of the road on a tightening corner and ended up in a barbed wire fence and eventually taking a detour through a cow paddock to get back on the road. Then in 2008 we pushed on just a little too hard on a wet morning where a top 10 was beckoning and again a tricky corner saw us leave the road and make heavy contact with the embankment and sustaining significant chassis damage.

The lessons learnt from these saw us change our approach slightly and recognise that we needed to dial back the intensity a notch if we wanted to continue competing safely and this approach worked for some years until another small error put us on the roof albeit with minimal damage. This crash was a little different as we weren’t pushing too hard or chasing a result but rather a forced poor diff ratio choice made the car feel slower than it was and a borderline pace note call saw us travelling too fast for the corner.

Again, we looked at lessons to learn and in this case we realised that as we were getting faster and more competitive we were also relying more on the pace notes and therefore any error in the notes was likely to have implications that we didn’t see in the past. This led us to put more effort into writing our own notes and eventually to moving over to commercially produced notes for most events for a more consistent result. We also realised that we needed more spare parts for the car so that a spare part would be the same as the race item so in this case a spare diff of the same ratio.

So armed with better notes and more experience we started to see better results and for a while we pretty much stood on the podium at almost every event if the car held together.

Obviously this is all leading somewhere so it shouldn’t be a surprise to read that we again crashed the car at the 2019 Adelaide Rally.

And this was a pretty big one by our standards.

The actual incident was pretty straight forward, on the Willunga Hill stage (2nd competitive stage of the event) the car in front had a driveline issue that meant we caught them just 45 seconds into the stage driving slowly in the left lane with their hazards flashing. We caught them at a very bad point after a high speed run tightened to a left-right sequence where my concentration dropped and I tried to go around them right on the tight corner and carried way too much speed to make it and ended up pinching a brake and running up the embankment on the right. This sent us back onto the road for a brief flight before landing on the road hard and into the Armco barrier on the left side and coming to rest with significant damage.

To be clear, this wasn't the fault of the slow moving car, I did this.

But it does show just how close to the edge you are sometimes and how every piece of the machine needs to be working to keep you on the road, it only takes a small lapse of concentration to see you off it.

In this case there are a number of factors that contributed to the crash (I'm trying to make it less my fault…). We only had 24 hours to turn around the car after Bathurst (including damage repair) and the tight lead up saw us complete our recce two weeks prior to the event in just two days and to save time we skipped the Willunga Hill stage being the furthest from home and an oft used stage in the past that we knew well.

At the stage start we had dropped down the field after refuelling (putting us amongst faster cars) and on launch the car was miss-firing leading to a slow start that I tried to make up for by pushing a little harder. It's only the third stage of the event, we're still getting into the groove and the fierce competition already has us checking the results after just one stage. And then we caught a slow moving car in a fast tight section on a stage where you would never catch another car.

Change any of those factor and maybe it doesn't happen? Who knows but there are again some lessons to be learnt and some things we can change.

Firstly, for the last few years we have had three events in three states over just four weeks that has made for a very tight turn around to change the car from rally spec to circuit and back again, sometimes in the hotel parking lot or the paddock at a racetrack. I think moving forward we won't put ourselves under the same time pressures again and will skip events if the calendar is too tight.

Secondly, we have got a bit slack with our recce in recent years. When we started out in rally we always wrote our own notes which meant doing several passes on each stage and perhaps going back weeks later for another pass before the event. Familiarity breeds contempt and with the Adelaide Rally drawing the same pool of stages every year (and Targa High Country using exactly the same roads every year) it's easy to forget the importance of recce. Time pressures also hurt as doing multiple passes on a 30+ stage event might take four days to complete and that's a lot when you're time poor (or lazy). Using commercial notes actually contributes to this as you have a lot of faith in the accuracy of the notes and recce becomes more about the pace and tone of delivery rather than double checking the corners. Even using different cars for recce can contribute here as not all cars will have the same amount of steering lock for the same corner which can lead to confusion.

And thirdly we need to dial it back again, especially in the early stages. We went into this event fresh from two recent events and confident that we were already in the groove, clearly this wasn't the case. We want to keep rallying and we want to stay safe so limiting the crashing is obviously an important component of that as is keeping up with all the latest safety standards for when it goes bad. The on board camera shows how well the HANS device works in limiting frontal head movement but there is still an alarming sideways head movement so perhaps then next item on the shopping list is some new wing seats to restrict this.

But for now the focus is on getting the car repaired. The crash shop thinks the front end damage can be pulled straight and that the body of the car isn't twisted so we just need some new panels and this might be the ideal time to switch over to fibreglass items. There is also a fair bit of suspension damage so we should be OK to repair or replace those parts but it is looking like at least three or four months before all the bits are available and we can get the car back so it's likely we'll miss a few events early in the new year.

Still, there is an empty space in the garage at home and enough room to start working on the engine rebuild for the Elfin, that's only been off the road for 9 months. And maybe I should also look at repairing the body damage that we received in that first crash back in 2006….

That won't buff out... 2019 Adelaide Rally