Hello Everyone,
I just got my membership to the forums activated so I thought I would start off by posting in a thread that has my picture in it.
We had a great time at the event. I wrote up my expiriences from the event in a little more detail which I will post below. Glad to be part of the forms and it is good to know some people where checking our times on the stages.
Andrew
Event write up:
The trip up was uneventful but
man gas is getting expensive and the farther north we went the higher
the prices got. When we arrived in Monticello it was snowing and around
28-30 degrees, a lot different than what is was around here.
Registration was smooth and they gave us about 10 different stickers to
put on the car our number was 36 but we ended up with road position of
30 or 32 due to some last minute withdrawals.
Recce was very necessary for this rally. I had heard some grumbling
about the stage notes before the rally but was very disappointed when we
got there to see how bad they were. They were hand written pages that
we then photo copied and put into a spiral bound book. There was way
way too much information per page. I think there was around 10-12 lines
of notes per page and it looked like solid text. It would have been
impossible to keep your place on a rough gravel stage with these notes.
The other issue was that the Ivan, who made the notes, had put in a
bunch of his own nomenclature including about 3 different types of
crests. There were no turn calls in the whole book, he would just call
the corner and not reference that you were going through a junction.
The biggest problem however was that on complicated instructions that
required a caution, the caution call was but after the instructions. So
it would be like R6 down over jump and L2 caution. So Simon and I made
some large changes to the notes including down grading corners to lower
numbers that were in tricky spots. Simon then re wrote all of the notes
by hand so that they were in a legible format.
Shakedown went well, the brakes in the car were feeling a little weak
so I had the crew bleed the brakes later before the start of the race.
But they never really got better. I think that the master cylinder is
almost dead on the rally car. Because our stopping distances were quite
long for most of the race and I was unable to get the wheels to lock no
matter how hard and fast I got on the brakes. More about this later.
The drivers meeting before the rally was something to behold. It was
about an hour long. Including speeches by Ivan, his wife (I am totally
blanking on her name), One of the local politicians, and the lead ham
operator. Ivan's speech took the cake. He went on for a least half an
hour berating all of the drivers that backed out at the last minute. He
said that he was going to loose $25,000 on the rally and that his
business was suffering for all of the time he was putting into the
rally. He also said that the he had better never again receive an
e-mail about how expensive the entry fee was unless we had a field of
150 competitors. He went on about how the even if you through the red
cross the rally doesn't really stop there is no real way to stop a
rally, and then he mentioned the incident with Doug Sheperd a couple of
years ago and stated that Sheperd should have been banned for life from
racing in the states. I think his point was that if the red cross is
thrown the stage is over and there is no point in racing toward the
finish. He went on to defend his non standard course notes and several
other things including chastising the Irish guys for not bringing
marshals to the event and I guess I couple of them backed out of sponsor
ship deals for the rally because they felt he was making too much money
off it. Basically he was airing some frustrations but I felt is was
very unprofessional and the most bizarre driver meeting I have ever
witnessed.
Now onto day one, it was raining pretty hard and was quite cold.
Since the rally car is not very well sealed and the heater core had
sprung a leak about a day before we left for the rally it was fogging up
the windshield pretty bad on the first couple of stages. Between stages
we were wiping down the inside of the windshield but this wasn't
helping. It was very strange even when you wiped the fog away you were
unable to get the window clear even in a very small area. It was almost
as if the windshield was fogging in the glass. By the end of the second
stage I was driving by the edges of the road. I could tell where it
went just not what the surface looked like. So we slowed down a little
and got to the end.
At service we tried cleaning the inside of the windshield but were still
unable to get all of the fog to go away. On the transit back to the
stages we decided that the problem had more to do with the cold rain
outside and the warm air on the inside. So we tried rolling the windows
down and equalizing the air temperatures. This worked. So we ran the
rest of day one with the windows down and the nets up in rain. So we
had a much better time going through the stages the second time other
than major patch of fog on the long stage that cut visibility down to
about 100-200 feet.
We were also having a problem with brake fade on the long stage were I
was loosing the pedal after about 7 miles of racing. I was able to pump
it a couple of times and get pressure back but it was not confidence
inspiring. At the end of the day though our times were good and we took
home 3rd in class and were 14th overall. Not too bad for a new team
with fogging windows and questionable brakes.
Day 2 started early and we got to run some new stages. It was cold but
dry so we didn't have to run with the windows down. I felt that our
times were good and we had fun on the Maithis Wieden Stage where the
surface changes to gravel in a couple of places. Including a nasty R2
off camber after a blind crest right before the finish. The second
stage of the day blind pond has a cool little jump in it and the light
scirocco was definitely air born over it. The 3rd time through blind
pond the stage was canceled because a resident had gone up the stage the
wrong way. These were far and away the most populated rally stages I
have ever seen. We had to make special notes in the stages notes to
avoid certain mailboxes that were in the racing line. So we were forced
to transit the stage and when we got over the jump there was an evo that
had messed up the jump and slid off the road into the pond that was
right next to it. The car was right side up with water up to about the
middle of the doors. There was a lot of media at that jump so I hope
someone got it on video.
The super special that happened after the lunch time service was pretty
lame it was on the air port runway but it consisted of a straight, 1
cichane, more straight a hard right and a straight to the finish. Simon
didn't even bother to read notes I drove and he waved at the fans. We
had instructed the crew to get new brake fluid to see if the problem
with the brakes fade on the longer stage was due to an open container of
fluid. So they picked up some Ford HD fluid and flushed the system with
it during lunch.
The afternoons stages were the stages from day 1 run in the opposite
direction. Since they were dry and we could see they were alot faster in
this direction. At one point on the long 2 lane highway section of the
17 mile stage I looked at the speedo and we were going well above 85.
And with the speedo reading about 10% off at 60 we figured we were going
over 100. The car was basically at read line in 4th gear, so I didn't
bother to reach for 5th. The new brake fluid solved the fade problem so
were able to push a little harder toward the end of the stage. We were
going so fast right before the finish that Simon got a little behind in
the calls but we talked about it after the stages and he was spot on the
last time through. The finish of that stage is like 200 Cr 200 Jump L6
200 R6 200 jump 100 R6 L6 ... So very very fast. So by the end of the
day we finished the rally and had placed 4th in our class for the
Saturday event. There was a nice ceremonial finish in Liberty with a
band, an announcer, and fireworks.
All in All it was a good rally. very very high speeds but with the
recce I felt it was pretty safe. The road surface was traditional
asphalt but was very broken up in a lot of places. And by the end of
the event there were some big pot holes to be found. I was really happy
with my high performance all season tire in the wet but once it dried
out I felt I could have used a little stickier tire. I think my
confidence level on tarmac has improved a lot and I can't wait until
rally Tennessee in the fall.
I want to thank Simon for his great work as co-driver. I was amazed how
well he did for his first event. I can only remember one corner that
was called incorrectly and corrected himself in time for me to adjust.
The only time he got lost in the notes is when the course marshals added
an extra chicane to the second stage. Which is a lot better than I did
the first time I co-drove with notes.
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