Once I am comfortable that nothing bad will jump out at me - a legacy of my Epynt "rib-breaker" - my driving improves and on the first couple of stages everyone said how much more committed we were looking. The stage times were pretty reasonable too, inside the top 5 despite a spin on stage 2.
Thinking about it, we had understeered through some cones on the previous corner and, coupled with the spin we were a bit confused as to why that had happened. Perhaps that was the start of our demise....
We pulled up to the start of Stage 4 and went through the countdown, three, two, one.....bang. We had broken a driveshaft and the car coasted to the side of the track.
This was our first retirement with the car and when we investigated, the left hand shaft had snapped like a carrot just before it goes through the rear hub. In our spares pack, we had another similarly broken shaft so clearly a weak point. Scott stripped the shaft and found the cv joint partially seized and quite rusty, clearly something we need to find a resolution for.
Following a discussion with Mike Sellars about the shafts in his rallycross car, we dcided to have R&D Developments make us a couple of pairs of stronger shafts and all the cv's were renewed at the same time so hopefully we won't suffer this one again.