Jon Tucker and his co-driver Scott Cleverdon competed on the Rallye Sunseeker last weekend in and around Bournemouth.  This was the inaugural round of the Peugeot 206 Super Cup which they are competing in this year.  21 identical 206 XSi’s lined up for the first stage all hoping to claim the £2000 prize money for winning.

There were 2 stages on Friday night along Bournemouth sea front, which attracted thousands of spectators.  These stages were on closed public roads, whereas the bulk of the rally was in the forest the next day.

5-4-3-2-1-GO and Jon and Scott set off into the stage, which was literally lined with spectators.  After only 100 yards their car simply died on them.  This was disastrous as the stage should only take about 2 minutes to complete, so any glitches and they would lose a lot of time.  They managed to get the car going only for it to cut out again just before the finish of the stage.  In total they lost about 40 seconds which put them last in the Peugeot category.  More importantly was what was wrong with the car as they still had another run along the sea front left that night.

They both frantically tried to find the fault in order to repair it, and tried changing various things on the car.  This seemed to work and they had a trouble free run on the next stage and didn’t lose any time.

Now the team of mechanics had the job of trying to work out what was causing the car to cut out.  After many hours of changing parts it looked like the car was repaired.  Just time for a few hours sleep before the next days stages.

All seemed to be going well through the morning, and Jon and Scott were making back some of the lost time.  They managed to get from 21st to 7th place with 3 stages still to go.  They only had 15 seconds to make up on another competitor to get into 6th place and they both thought this was more than achievable.  The last 3 stages were to be held in the forests in the dark, so spotlights were fitted to the car and they were ready to attack and get the 15 seconds needed.  The 1st of the dark stages went very well, and they actually took 13 seconds from the competitor in 6th place.  Only 2 more seconds to go.

Half way into the 2nd night stage and they couldn’t believe it when the car cut out in exactly the same way.  They did everything they knew of to get the car to the end without losing too much time, but inevitably they had dropped back a few places.  With no service time between that and the next stage they had to start the last stage with a car that kept cutting out.

“At one point in the last stage I really didn’t think we were going to make it to the end.  It is so frustrating when the car simply wont go and really dangerous too, normally you would use the power to get out of trouble but when there is no power it is very easy to spin of go off the road.  Even when we did manage to get going we had no lights, which made it a scary ride, as we were still trying to minimise the lost time”

They managed to get the car to the end of the stage and to the finish ramp in Bournemouth town centre, to finish in 11th position in the Peugeot 206 Super Cup.  This gives them both 10 points.  Their sponsor ‘Truscotts of Barnstaple’ are now in 6th place in the Peugeot dealer cup.