Cruttenden competes in Tour of Flanders rally

Joe co-drove this Opel Corsa

Nehwey rally co-driver Joe Cruttenden competed in Belgium on the Tour of Flanders rally over the weekend.

Joe was invited to sit next to Norfolk based driver, Richard Archer in his Super 1600 Opel Corsa.

“I have known of Richards’s reputation of being a quick driver for some years now, and jumped at the opportunity to compete with him on the famous rally roads of Belgium,” Joe said.

The event started on Friday night with the opening two stages, the pair got off to a good start by setting quickest class times the, finishing the night first in class.

Then their bad luck started, “We parked the recce car in Ypres Square, woke up Saturday and it wasn't there. It had been towed away because of the market in the square, so at 6am we were on our way to the police station to get it back, and by 7 we were on our way to service,” said Joe.

Their bad luck continued when they slid off on Stage 3, got stuck for two minutes and picked up a puncture as well as smashing the windscreen. On stage 4 the crew misjudged a 90 degree right hander, which saw the car drop slowly into a ditch, and loose a minute and half.

On the famous Passendale stage the pair were attacking to make up some lost time when they cut a fast right hand corner clipping something solid and immediately puncturing the front right tyre. The pair decided to stop and change the wheel mid stage, which cost them 6 minutes. “Everyone else had cut this corner but it was our luck to hit something,” said Joe.

They made some setup changes before the last 4 stages, and it transformed the car, but due to the number of times they and other cars had gone off they decided not to use their light pod on the last 2 night stages.

“Two thousand pounds worth of light would have gone west had we have gone off again during the night stages, but looking back if we had taken them and not have gone off we could have finished 1st in class,” said Joe.

The pair finished 3rd in class after the 14 stages, just 1 minute 48 seconds behind the eventual class winners, having dropped 13 minutes with the various problems.

Joe’s next outing will be the final round of the BTRDA championship, the Cambrian Rally, in Wales