A typical rally driving day in a competitive event

If you're competing, your rally driving day may be a fair way from home, so staying overnight is common. Generally the rally team take the car on a trailer behind a van to a venue the night before where the car goes through 'scrutineering'. This comprises safety and various other checks on your car, to make sure it is eligible to rally the next day. After that you and your codriver go to 'signing on', which is where you are given all the documentation for the rally, including the stage book and the road book.

Usually in the evening, your navigator will spend some time preparing for the rally the next day, checking maps, directions and stages, often talking through with you.

In the morning of the rally you should stomach breakfast, although the nerves can make it a little indigestable at times ! A few last minute checks on the car and you set off for the start, for which you have a specified time. There may sometimes be a start ramp and if you're lucky, someone from the press might stick a microphone through your window and interview you.

One of the most important things is that the navigator takes some travel sickness pills, because swaying around rally stages all day, with your head in a map is guaranteed to sicken the hardiest of stomachs !

Most rally drivers are avid weather watchers, mainly because if you get the weather wrong and choose the wrong tyres, you can find yourself so far behind your competitors after the first few stages, that you can't catch up.

If you're lucky you may get time to swap some tyres after stage 1, where there may be what is called an 'emergency service' where your 'chase car' can meet you.

So before the start of the rally it pays to get a good idea of at least what weather is expected.

From the rally start, you'll usually have a road section before you get to the first competitive stage. The first stage is where some rally drivers get what is called "red mist" - a dodgy mixture of nerves, adrenalin and excitement that makes some drivers go way too fast and crash early on in the rally.

Many rally drivers will tell you that their best performances, as with many sports, are when they have a kind of cold, calm concentration.

Depending very much on the rally, sometimes the first stage will be a "spectator stage", which is a stage set up somewhere where its easy and safe for people to watch. For instance there is a rally that runs from Llandudno in North Wales, which is mainly in forestry, but the first stage runs around the Great Orme - a tarmac stage which is good for spectating.

You will then spend the rally day speeding through different stages with road sections inbetween. Also your car will need to stop at the pre-arranged service areas for your mechanics to check it over.

Of course, spectators appear in the forests as well, it just takes more effort to tramp around the woods and tracks to the stages. It should be said that the forest spectator access points are organised for safety, but you can often walk by the side of the stage to different bends as long as you're very careful - its often difficult to hear some of the rally cars. Seeing a National or WRC rally live is one of the most exciting experiences of rallying you can have; the sight of rally cars at full speed on forest tracks is something to relish.

During the course of the day you spend rallying, you'll be using the clutch, the brakes, the steering wheel hundreds of times and often at quite high speed. This all requires a good level of fitness and like most sports it makes quite a difference to performance, although it has to be said that not a lot of rally drivers pay much deliberate attention to it, until you get to International level top drivers.

For instance, if you've got a competition rally clutch installed, it has much stronger springs than a standard one and you can easily find your leg getting quite tired.

Even if you're the smoothest rally driver, you'll also be moving your arms about rapidly all the way through the rally stages. Any slowing of that ability will affect your performance, especially towards the end of the rally day.