Haddon Paddon: Rally Spain - Day 2

Today at Rally Spain has been a much better day for us. After the disappointment of not getting any stage miles yesterday, the team were able to make repairs to get us restarted today. The problem was the smallest piece of plastic isolated one of the main terminals for the throttle power.

Nevertheless the whole focus for this rally was to gain more experience on tarmac and set fast times, and being able to restart today allowed us to do that. Also another priority of ours is that we need just 1 more point to win this years Subaru Challenge award and the prize money that comes with it.

The first stage this morning took some time to settle into it, after our last event on tarmac was over 12 months ago. Once I got the hang of it, we started to build on confidence with every stage. Our only small issue was a bad tyre choice I made this morning. Being that everyone was on the hard compound tyre I thought we had nothing to lose and would go on the softer tyre for the colder morning conditions. This wasn’t the best decision and the car was moving around a lot on tyres that quickly overheated.

At the midday service we were able to bolt of a set of the harder compound tyres and this afternoon has been much better. Our speed and times have been good, winning 5 of the 6 stages.

It is encouraging as we are still learning with every stage and the pace is quite comfortable. You can see our video blog by the following link:

Today there have also been thousands of spectators lining the roads and it has been great to see the Kiwi flags waving amongst them.

Tomorrow we have another 6 tarmac stages were the target will be to pick up where we left off on the final stage today and continue to pick up our pace. Thanks for all your support, look forward to hearing the rugby result!