Lost And Confused

evo.co.uk’s web editor is a slave to technology. So we sent him to navigate on a classic rally. With a map

- Hunter Skipworth

I MESSED ABOUT AT SCHOOL . BORED, distracted, teenage, hormonal – whatever the excuse, it all manifested itself in maths lessons. If only I’d known that numeracy and co-driving a rally car were intrinsically linked I might have listened. Sadly I didn’t, and those years of doodling in exercise books are about to come back and bite me.

Then again, the 13-year-old me never thought he’d be sitting in the co-driver’s seat of a stripped-out Mk2 Golf GTI competing in a live rally. So now, at the exact point where I need the cranium processing power of Stephen Hawking, my grey matter rivals that of Donald Trump. How could I have forgotten how to do sums?

‘You just add the difference onto our time that the timekeeper writes on the time-card. That’s when we start,’ explains my driver, Fabian Kreim. The 24-year-old recently wrapped up the German Rally Championship in his Skoda Fabia R5, and I’ll be calling notes for him today. I start counting with my fingers. Kreim laughs. I send us to time-control a minute early and we get a penalty. We’ll laugh about this later in the bar. Won’t we?

WHEN EVO’S RESIDENT GRUMP , Stuart Gallagher, asked if I wanted to sit beside a rally driver at the Rally legend event and call the pace notes, I thought our esteemed managing editor was winding me up. He typically sends me to cover the reveal of a new satnav, not to partake in a rally. Of course, I didn’t believe I’d be co-driving for real, rather it would be a PR exercise to give a pampered hack the opportunity to experience what a professional co-driver does…