Braking bad - scary moments in Otago

A 'no brakes' moment gave Emma Gilmour a scare during the Rally of Otago. Photo / Geoff Ridder

The first round of the NZ Rally Championship was run last weekend in Dunedin - a pretty solid start to the season with a second overall, although we are only fourth on points in the Championship.

Now, like many people this week, you may ask how does this happen? Well, our championship runs in a heat format, with each day counting as a separate rally.

We get points for each day and then bonus points for the overall result – unfortunately last week was the first time an anomaly came up with the system and someone finished lower in points standings than they did overall – and that anomaly was me!

Day one was run in North Otago and was quite tough as we were car three on the road, which meant we spent the whole day clearing gravel for the vehicles behind us.

Running the event earlier in the year than normal meant there was a lot of dry, thick gravel, which meant that the dust was terrible and there was many times when we couldn't see the road directly in front of us.

By the end of the day things had started to improve and we had our first stage win of the season.

The following day was going very well and we were battling Chris West for the heat win, but lost our brakes in the middle of one of the stages up near Middlemarch and it made for some hairy moments.

In my eight years of rallying I have never ever experienced a total loss of brakes and this time it caught me completely by surprise.

We had cut across a clearing as another competitor had pulled a stump onto the road and as I went for the brakes at the next corner we had absolutely nothing.

Unbeknownst to me – a small stone had got into the brake calliper and dented the top piston allowing all of the brake fluid to run out – leaving us with no brakes apart from the handbrake.

It is a pretty scary feeling to have no brakes at all –yet due to the fact I'm a rally driver and some of my saneness must be missing we continued to the end of the stage still pretty fast.

The car is now being stripped in preparation for the next event – The Rally of New Zealand on the 7-9 May.

We were slightly down on power at Otago after I drove a bit too quickly through a deep ford on special stage 4 and damaged the engine. So now an engine rebuild has been added to the fix list along with doing the gearbox, diffs and suspension. It will make for a busy couple of weeks.