May
27
Hayden Paddon: Pre-Rally Portugal
Hi,
We have now completed our two days of recce, which have gone smoothly and well. First impressions of the roads after coming from Rally New Zealand are that they are very technical. There are a lot of things happening, which comes from a combination of short corners, short, sharp crests and combinations of corners. We have written some good pace notes, but they are very busy so that they describe the road accurately and at what speed we should tackle it. The other difference here is the large rocks that are embedded in the side of the roads and the bedrock in the surface. This means there is no room for going off line or cutting corners – as we rally drivers naturally like to do.
As I mentioned on Monday, ESP are here to evaluate our personal performance, using several unique and sophisticated measuring techniques. For today’s recce and Friday’s part of the rally the guys at ESP are monitoring our core temperature, heart rate, fluid intake, hydration level, reaction times and alertness. This is done using several dexterity tests that we do throughout each of these days, plus a device that we have strapped to our bodies which records all key body data. From all this info they will be able to advise each crew member on their performance and make suggestions on things that we are doing correctly, or incorrectly, so we can optimise our personal performance. To have this sort of help and information available to us is massive and it will help us have a much better understanding of how our bodies cope with a hot rally.
The Ralliart Italy team have all but finished the cars for the rally and they are looking great! For this event we are starting with the same set-up we finished Turkey with and we will aim to further develop the car from there, which, combined with more seat time, should allow me to feel more at one with the car. We will also try a couple of things at shakedown tomorrow, but we know the shakedown stage is not representative of the rally, so we need to make sure that we do not go around in circles chasing things that do not need to be chased. Tomorrow concludes with the first stage of the rally, the Super Special stage, which is impressively situated inside, and a little bit outside, a football stadium.
Hayden