Welcome to Nut Behind The Wheel

The personal web site of (Graham Martin), and also the home of North East Wales Institute Rallying.

Latest News:

25/02/08: We did our first rally of the season, Rally CWM Gwendraeth on the 17th Feb. We had a really good day with positive steps forward with our newly re-shelled car. However the rear engine mount broke very radomly. A lot of hard work from the team saw us be able to get to the next stage, however we were over our lateness allowance from service, so were excluded. We were running 26th Overall and 5th in class when we encountered the problem. This was also our first run on the new Carbone Lorraine pads we ordered through K-Tec Racing. Read my review here...
I have also got some in-car footage from this event. Watch this space for the video! (Graham)

30/01/08: The re-shelled rally car has now been MSA log booked and is now officially ready to rally! I have sent out an entry to Rally Cwn Gwendraeth on the 17th Feb, so should be attending that. Hopefully between now and then we will get some testing time at Anglesey if all goes to plan. (Graham)

26/01/08: Whilst waiting for the rally car to be log booked, I have been hunting for a new set of brake pads for my 4-pot high spec calipers. I have heard a lot about Carbone Lorraine who make sintered pads and are very well known in the motorcycle world. They don’t specifically make a pad for my caliper, but I have found a pad shape that should fit and ordered their RC6 compound, (0.55 co-efficient), and RC8 compound, (0.65 co-efficient of friction). I’m looking forward to testing these in the weeks to come. We’re waiting for them to come from france. (Graham)

Introduction:

I’m 23 years old and doing Performance Car Technology BEng at NEWI, Wrexham. Whilst there I’ve been fortunate enough continue my very involved hobby, rallying. I’m doing the National Welsh Tarmac rally championship with the support of staff and students. We run an after lecture hours team, which is now
NEWI Rallying.

If you are a student at Wrexham, or a passing visitor in or around Wrexham, then please take a look at our sponsor page. We are very pleased to be working with our sponsors and it is thanks to them that NEWI Rallying exists.

The 2007 season:

North West Stages
The season started off in Blackpool February 18th at the Legend Fires North West Stages rally. This was Tim’s, (Co-driver), first rally ever and my first multi-venue stage rally too. Starting off at 10am and finishing at 9pm was a very hard day.

Although we managed to get to the very last Blackpool sea-front special stage, (24 out of 24!), we were unable to finish the rally. As we were going across the flying finish, the right hand bottom ball joint ripped itself out of the hub, turning the wheel under the car and leaving us to a slalom skid before we got to a stand still. Other than that, the whole day went well, it was just a shame we didn’t finish.
The whole rally was much of a tester for us, both for Tim, co-driving on his first ever rally and myself having to organise a multi-venue rally.

Tour of Caerwent
This was our second event of the year on the 25th March. As it was M.O.D property we were not allowed to take pictures or video of the stages. It would have made for quite impressive viewing!
I was in a very bad mood for some reason, (probably slept badly), and decided that I’d just cruise round and do whatever I could. After a pretty tame 1st stage, we got to the end of the second thinking we hadn’t been going too well. In fact, not known to us, but we were running 20th overall, not bad for our first trip to the venue!
On the 3rd stage the route had changed and coming round a 80mph+ sweeping bend it tightened up and ended up with us sideways partly on the grass, partly on tarmac. I managed to clip the back left hand tyre on a angled iron fence and re-arrange the suspension geometry. The risk of crashing again with a very crabbing car out weighed the gain from carrying on, so we called it a day after we assessed the damage.

Once back in NEWI’s workshop I stripped the rear suspension assembly and found a very bannana shaped part that need replacement!! There were a few other parts which needed attention like a crunching gearbox and some new additions. So a few long weeks were spent adding and changing parts until I was happy.

Mid Summer Caerwent
This was our third and final event of the year on the 17th of June. We didn’t mean to make it the last event of 2007, but it turned out to be.
It was a return to the very same venue that we’d had the accident at that re-arranged my rear suspension earlier on in the year. So as you’d expect I was very nervous at returning to the venue and being able to set good stage times without high-risk driving, so I decided nice and steady was the plan.
The first few stages had very changeable conditions, with a few of the front runners falling foul of big pools of water. One of the mark one escorts taking a sideways trip straight at the wall and writing the car off made me very wary that I didn’t want to have another accident.
The rest of the stages were taken at a good pace, getting quicker throughout the day. Both Tim and myself working much better together having learnt the ropes from the two previous rallies. The only problem we experience, was a stripped thread on a wheel stud, so we had to run three studs on the rear right hand wheel for the rest of the day.
Luckily this didn’t have much of an effect to slow me down and we gradually climbed the order to finish 26th Overall and 4th in class. The only rally finish of the year!! (Rallying is a very tough sport)

After a successful finish at this rally spirits were high. However, one of the team noticed that the car was still crabbing slightly. I wasn’t happy with this and endevoured to find out what was wrong with the car. After a long search, I decided the rear of the chassis was probably bent and the best solution to fix this would be to re-shell the car and make it like new.

So between August and December 2007 I took the rally car off the road and re-shelled all the competition parts into a good shell I had already. Read about the re-shell here....