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Nicky Grist’s Road Rally Comeback – One Night Only

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Nicky Grist’s Road Rally Comeback – One Night Only

*Photo: Sarah Canning


Dusting down his old poti lamp, roamers, pens and pencils and digging out a double-sided clipboard to carry the passage control and time cards – he had to take a certainly element of stock from the Nicky Grist Motorsports stores to enable him to complete. A poti light is an important bit of equipment, this map magnifier is vital for map reading and not just on a road rally, he once used it in the forests in the days before pacenotes. It still works perfectly today. 

Saying that, it’s over 30 years since Steve Davies and Nicky Grist were road rallying together, but the 1984 Cilwendeg Rally winning duo showed they’d lost none of their talent when they were reunited in an Escort Mk2 for the recent Heads of the Valleys Auto Club’s Homes of Elegance 1000 Lanes Road Rally. It proved to be a lot of fun, and it showed that road rallying is still a great place for an aspiring young co-driver to start. So, having dusted off his old poti lamp and pinched a roamer and double-sided clipboard from the Nicky Grist Motorsports storeroom, how did Nicky get on?

“Steve Davies contacted me and said ‘do you fancy doing course car on the 1000 Lanes Road Rally with me?’ I had to think about it, but the fact that it’s my local road rally around Abergavenny, with a petrol halt at two thirty in the morning in Hereford Road Filling Station and a road section that passes within two hundred yards from my house – well, I thought it can’t do any harm, so we went out there and had some fun.

“I actually started my rallying career with Steve when we did the 1982 Welsh Road Rally Championship in the 1300 class, which we won. Then we did the Welsh Road Rally Championship in a two-litre Escort the following year, which we won. We then competed on a number of different events, including some Motoring News night events in 1984. We won quite a few rallies, including the Cilwendeg, which was the big event that everybody wanted to win at the time. We also did some Volkswagen Junior Cup and Vauxhall Nova Cup stuff in the forest, but with the exception of one section on the fifth anniversary of the Cilwendeg a few years ago, Steve and I haven’t sat together since about 1986.

“It was nice to see all the hype up at the start at a pub on the outskirts of Abergavenny, and there were a lot of people around. It was interesting to see how much road rallying has changed – in and out of farm yards, around triangles, stopping and starting, loads of passage controls and such tight and twisty lanes that I didn’t think even existed in this area. Steve drove his own road rally Escort. He hadn’t driven it for over twelve months ago, but despite this he drove very well. He certainly hasn’t lost it, even though we’re both old timers! We had some good fun and we got around all bar the last three miles because we had a puncture and pulled off the route so we didn’t delay the cars in the event. We virtually completed the whole route and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. So much so, that Steve’s keen to do more – but that doesn’t mean I’m having a comeback too!

“What the night highlighted was that modern day road rallying is still a great place for co-drivers to start, because you have to multi-task. Trying to extract information off a map that’s not as detailed as you’d like it to be is quite a skill, and trying to do that as well as working out all the timings and passage controls, looking at different paperwork like diagrams of how to negotiate a triangle – trying to do all those at once, at night, in a rally car, is quite different. If you can road rally well, you can co-drive on a stage rally easily, and I think it’s a fantastic grounding for any young navigator. To become a good co-driver, it’s the place to start. Okay, you need to have experience in the forests, because it doesn’t mean that if you’re a brilliant road rally co-driver you’ll get on in stage rallying; you still have to have stage rally experience, but start there, move into the forests and mix a little bit of both for a while – it’s exactly what I did, and it never did me any harm.

Someone asked Steve "how was Nicky on the maps"to which he replied "he’s got potential!!!". Nicky said laughingly, "that will do for me!". While he was a little out of practice co-driving in the lanes he did not make a wrong slot, but it didn’t take long to get back into the swing of things. Other than the fact he had to wear glasses to read the map, not a lot has changed!