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Irish Trial and Tour

Day 4 - Galway to Enniskillen

The gorgeous sun and brilliant blue skies of this morning, at Galway, was favoured by all after the first few days of drizzle and rain. The atmosphere coming from the car park, at the Main Control in the Corrib Great Southern hotel, was bright, breezy and raring to go.

At the start, the route took crews west from Galway into one of Ireland's Gaelic speaking regions, Connemara, along much developed coastal highway before turning inland to join smaller roads. Along side one of the roads, at Cashel, the competitors came across Willie Boulger's pub, with a sign outside reading 'drinking consultants'.

The Rally then headed north to Letterfrack, where almost immediately afterwards, they started the first Regularity Section of the Day which explored the lesser known roads of the Rinvyle peninsula. This Regularity, like Day 3, proved to be demanding on the crews and especially there navigators. Mike Goodbun and Joy Hewson, in the cute Austin A40, wrong slotted and ended up dodging on-coming Rally traffic, whereas car 54, Jan Veening and Marian Dethmer's 1967 Peugeot 404, found themselves in a ditch after avoiding a series of pot-holes. Luckily help was on hand to pull them out and, due to the heavy rain we had on previous days, the ground was soft cushioning its fall with almost no harm to the car.

Miles Colebrook and Patrick Millet in their 1954 MG TF felt their steering going sloppy so they stopped and, after examining the car, found that the nuts and bolts holding the front axle had undone and disappeared - most probably after carrying out some fast manoeuvres. They crawled to the next town doing no more than 7 mph and asked a local if he knew of any mechanic that could help them, to which he replied 'Jim'll Fix It'. Jim was found and replied "Yes, I've got bolts for that" - 3 minutes later they were set back on their merry way.

After lunch at the Towers pub at Westport Quay the cars ran through attractive county roads passing Beltra Lough, Pontoon and the old woollen mills at Foxford en route to Ballymote and the Arigna Mountains where the most demanding Regularity of the event was situated.

Car 62, the white Porsche 356C, driven by Cal Winterstein and navigated by his father Clive, from South Africa, found themselves on a very narrow road heading straight for an oncoming horse trailer. They also had a long stream of rally traffic behind them. After some quick thinking by Cal, they turned into a private driveway, followed almost immediately by the line of Rally traffic behind them. The only problem with this was to exit the driveway all cars had to reverse out, meaning that the cars in front now found themselves at the rare, but to top it all off, in order for all the traffic to fit in the drive Cal and Clive had driven straight into a mud bath at the top of the drive and needed assistance to be pulled out.

The rally then entered Northern Ireland at Swanlinbar before taking two demanding tests on concrete farm lanes and one special test and Observed Regularity Section finishing at the viewpoint of Gortalughany, where stunning views were seen by all who visited, prior to finishing at the glorious National Trust house of Florence Court.

So after the forth day Paul and Jayne Wignall had regained their lead, with 481 penalty marks, after dropping down to 4th position the previous day, while Geoff Stewart and Peter Murray dropped from 1st position to 4th with 566 marks. The battle between 2nd and 3rd place is extremely tight with only 7 penalty marks between Michael and Lora Harrison in their 1963 Triumph TR4 and Charles and Kit Graves in their beautiful Jaguar XK150 FHC.