AN UNLIKELY HERO
The first rally in my 411 s3 was with my oldest friend and brother-in-arms, John. It was on the Historic Endurance Rallying Organisation’s crown jewel event, the daunting LeJog (Land’s End to John O’Groats).
LeJog and my now nine years as a Bristol owner are intrinsically linked as it was the idea of the former which led me to purchase the latter. You might be thinking: ‘Hold on, are you saying you bought a Bristol specifically to compete in one of the most demanding amateur rallying events on the globe?’ I admit that if you put it like that it is hard to reconcile, but yes, this is in fact exactly how it happened!
I’ve always had a passion for engineering, nurtured by a childhood spent in the garage where my father had assembled a small model engineering workshop. As I got to driving age, this passion for engineering acquired a focus in cars and, most specifically, Italian cars. My wish list was a roll call of baby exotica, the Lancia Montecarlo topping a name check which included the Fiat X19 and Alfasud Sprint.
Fast forward to 2012. By this time I had indulged some of my Italian car passion and although I loved the classic era of the 1960s and 1970s Italians, I was not particularly gripped by a love of classics more generally. Until, that is, I stumbled across an article about LeJog and was immediately captured by a sort of bucket list desire to compete. There was one problem. Actually of course there were dozens of problems, but
