Mike Reed and Scott Cleverdon made the long journey to North Wales for the Cambrian Rally, based in Llandudno, on 6th November.

With there only being a week between rallies there wasn't much time to do any work to the engine to iron out the engine problems from it's rebuild.  We still wanted to get to the Cambrian as it's usually a tough and demanding rally.  This year was no exception.

First stage was, as always, a run around the infamous 'Great Orme'.  We were in the queue for this stage and with only a few cars due to go before us, the stage was stopped for an accident.  Another competitor had gone through the wall, with there being nothing except a big drop to the sea on the other side.  Luckily the car stopped in the wall and they were both safe.  This took about 1 hour, so all the warming up of the car (and ourselves) on the approach to the stage was wasted.  In this hour it started to rain, which made the stage very slippery.  This wasn't helped by the car jumping out of 4th gear on a lot of the bends.  This made the car slide wide every time and meant we couldn't really attack the stage.  We got through and into service where there was just time to change to forest tyres and out on the long road section to the Alwen forest.

We started the Alwen stage hoping the gearbox wouldn't be so bad in the forest, but it was, and was making it pretty dangerous as a lot of the fast bends were taken in 4th or 5th gear, meaning we didn't have the power to get out of trouble.  Coming into a tight left hand bend we shattered a wheel in half on a big stone in the road, which we had to stop and change.  This took about 3 or 4 minutes and combined with the gearbox problems we decided to withdraw from the rally at the end of the stage.

The car is now having a full rebuild over the winter in preparation for the 2005 BTRDA season. 

The BTRDA calendar is as follows: