The ‘Graham Roberts Autos’ Rally Team made the long journey to Kelso, near Edinburgh, last week to compete on one of the countries most famous rallies, the Jim Clark Memorial Rally.

Graham used the services of North Devon Co-Driver Scott Cleverdon for the event, and the pair spent a day making pacenotes in preparation for the rally.

The rally started on Friday in the early evening and headed into the famous lanes around the Duns and Kelso area for first leg.  They had a very good start to the rally, and were lying 16th of the 60 crews.  The team were caught out on a very slippery hairpin bend, which caught a rear wheel on a bank and broke a driveshaft.  This dropped them about 2 minutes as they had to drive the rest of the stage in front wheel drive.

They got to the end of the next few stages and back into service where the mechanics did an excellent job and repaired the car ready for the next day’s competition.

The rally started again early the next morning and the clouds weren’t looking too favourable, but there was no sign of rain so the team went out on intermediate tyres.  Just as the team were about to start the 2nd stage of the day the heavens opened and they had to drive the stage in torrential rain.  This didn’t prove a problem and they completed the stage setting a good time.

A few stages later and the weather had changed back to sunshine.  All was going well in stage 9 until the gear stick went all loose and they couldn’t get the car into gear.  Graham has had problems with his gearbox before and they thought this was the same problem so parked the car at the side of the stage because they had no drive and were about to retire, when they saw it was only the gear linkage that had broken off at a join so they were able to temporarily fix this to finish the stage, but it had dropped them another 2 minutes.

All was going well in the next batch of stages, with the weather still changing from wet to dry very rapidly, until they got a puncture in one of the longest stages of the rally.

“The car slid sideways on a tight bend, which Graham managed to control, but we knew we had a puncture.  We decided to continue as it would lose us more time stopping and changing it.  It did get a bit worrying when the car was filling with black tyre smoke but we battled on and changed it after the stage” said Scott.  This had cost them another minute, but at least they were still in the rally.  They continued on to the finish, and after 16 stages and despite all the problems they had encountered, finished an amazing 23rd overall.