Sunday - Day -2

On Sunday morning we took a short drive to the Silverdome where Rally HQ is based, this is a big sports venue, with a velodrome, and the cars all congregate on the sports wooden floor inside the velodrome, and then drive up out each day to go rallying. We went up there to get a better idea of the documentation and scrutineering that we'd need to do on Monday, and to meet the super-helpful Helen Coad from the Organisers, who I've been in touch with for about 18 months, and also Jason Bresnahan, who had been assigned to us as our Competitor Relationship Officer, one is assigned to each First-time crew to help them understand the workings of the event, and he was indeed very helpful and informative.

We then drove out to Longford - which was a road circuit back in the 60's where they raced during the Tasman Cup series. This weekend was the inaugural Longford Revival meeting, organised by the same team behind Targa. Unfortunately the full circuit is not available any longer, however Longford had a famous mile-long straight "The Flying Mile", and this was being used for demonstration runs. The event is modelling itself on a small-scale Goodwood Festival of Speed, and it looked to have achieved a good turn-out of both participants and paying public. It would have been nice to see a few 60's single seaters to better illustrate what the event was famous for, but then coming from the UK, I think we are just spoiled by all the fabulous events on our doorstep, and by the huge pool of cars that can be drawn on by the organisers of such events - this was a good show, and it deserves to grow.

Running two cars at Longford was Scotty Taylor, so we tracked him down pretty much as soon as we arrived, at which point he was talking to a couple of guys, who he immediately introduced me too, these were chaps from the local ABC Hobart radio station, who were putting out a live broadcast from the event, and were drawing Scotty out for an interview, which they then dragged me into as well, so within 10 minutes of arriving I am on ABC Radio Hobart! Coupled with the TV interview I gave to 'inpitlane' at Phillip Island, I can't help feeling that fame awaits ... My invite to 'I'm a Celebrity a get me out of here' must be just around the corner!

Rest of the day was taken up with car preparation, cleaning and fixing the stickers (which actually turned out to be more time consuming than we had anticipated).