When I turned up at Kemble Airfield this week, I thought recording the noise of various rally cars would be a simple task of bunging a microphone in the engine bay, another at the exhaust and Bob’s your uncle. Well, maybe the microphone would be a bit more sophisticated than a Dictaphone, but still nothing fancy. Was I wrong!

I should have realised that when the developers at Codemasters want to re-record their favourite cars using the latest technology, they don’t mess about. They engaged the services of John Price Rallying to round up legendary rally cars (hence Slowly Sideways’ presence) and brought their audio gurus with their state of the art electronics to do the recording at Kemble Airfield near Cirencester, the venue for two full days of intense activity. 

The first car to be given the Codemasters treatment was Charlie Blaney’s Metro 6R4, the ex John Price red & white Ferodo car and John was in attendance along with his service van. Inside were two days worth of cups of tea and biscuits for everyone plus a Renault 5 Maxi Turbo.

Mark Knight, leading the Codemasters team, started the complex process of  selecting sites on the 6R4 for the mikes (both exhausts, engine air intake and 2 others I didn’t spot), attaching them and the yards of associated cables with gaffer tape (they’d used two rolls by the time they were happy!) and hooking them up to the lap mounted computer once Mark had taken his place in the passenger seat. After about 90 minutes, the 6R4 was able to take to the empty runway for controlled blasts up to the rev limiter in each gear, past numerous dead Boeing 747s and then back to the pits to download about 1.5gb of data and analyse it to see if the results were satisfactory. They decided a few tweeks were necessary, right down to the level of clipping the length of the fur covers on the mikes and then out again for more runs. Happy with the results, Codemasters transferred all the equipment to car two.    

Mark is a confirmed petrolhead and enthused about the 6R4 noises - ‘What’s he in a Metro for then?’ said Gary Midwinter – ‘Wait until he gets in the quattro!’

Gary’s fabulous quattro was indeed car two. With more experience of the weather conditions, preparing the quattro was much quicker and it was soon ready to run and set off for four hugely noisy sprints down the runway.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before John’s Maxi Turbo and Chris Rabbets’ Alpine A110 were Dictaphone’d so apologies to both for the lack of mike’d up pictures and I wasn’t able to go back for day two when Steve Rockingham’s Sunbeam Lotus, Dave Kedward’s Chevette and John’s Renault were recorded.

So when the DiRT 3 video game is released in 2011, you’ll know something of the work involved in recording the excellent car sounds…and see if you can spot the fart!          

Mark has sent us some cracking images from the 2011 game: –  

Images From The Day

Syd Wall