Cross posted from my blog. Thanks for the support guys! And a glare at my father for the David Bowie avatar
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100 Acre Woods, Conclusion
Wow, what a weekend!
I learned about the event and my participation Tuesday afternoon, I flew out Wednesday evening. I arrived early thursday, local time, and was picked up by Burak at the airport, we drove the 2 hours to the main hotel and went to bed after finding a room. After 2 hours of sleep, we got up and recceed all day. Over Wednesday night it had snowed and iced... so the 100 Acre Woods quickly became a ice rally
We soon learned that our crew couldn't make it because of the Boston airport closing due to the winter weather. This certainly put the biggest damper on the entire weekend. Though it is certainly possible to crew for oneself (thanks to other helpful crews), it isn't exactly a walk in the park.
We had Alex (one of the guys who was supposed to crew for us) order some snow tires to be shipped overnight to a local tire shop from tirerack.com.
Friday comes around and we deal with a number of things, including tech inspection. We have to be over at park expose(which is a 40 minute drive) at 1pm. We show up at the garage around 11:30am... to find our tires haven't arrived yet. At 12:20pm, I send Burak off with the car to park expose, myself staying behind with the service vehicle to wait for the tires to arrive and be mounted. At around 2pm, we find that the tires have been delivered and signed for... but they are not at our garage!! We eventually find out they were miss-shipped by tirerack to the garage down the street! >< We, unfortunately, ran out of time and I had to head to park expose. We convinced the garage we were at(Knight and Maher, Salem, Missouri) to go pick up our tires, mount them, and leave them outside for us!
We ran friday with gravel tires on the snow/ice mix... which means we were not having any fun at all, nor going fast. Stages 1 and 2 were slow, but we had no problems. At the beginning of stage 3, there was a long hill of ice. Our first time through, we saw a car pulled over, so we slowed down and passed them, only to find this massive hill. We had neither the speed or traction to make the hill and eventually just ran out of steam. We reversed down, all the while letting the other cars past. When all was said and done, 3 cars (including our car) got stuck... all 2wd and all with gravel tires. We and the VW Golf tried once in conjunction. We both had a minimal running start and both couldn't make it. We went back down and Sweep caught up with us. They kindly reversed to allow us a longer running start. The Golf took a full run and unfortunately didn't make it. They reversed back down and then we got a full-speed run. We had the speed, the grip, and everything was going right... up until we met an ATV on stage, driving towards us! (which is very dangerous!) We had to move to avoid him, which means we lost our traction, so we turned around, drove down, and pulled a u-turn. In the hopes that the guy would have gotten off the road(since we were running out of time) we tried again to find him still on the road. >< We turned around, got to the bottom and we are about to try again... when we see his headlights heading towards us... we let him pass and are about to try one last time... when sweep time-bars us. Weee!
We drove back to rally HQ, where I wrote a protest against the actions and events. My protest allowed all three cars stuck to get bogey times for stages 3 and 4 for friday, and for all of us to be entered back in the race for saturday! We mounted the snow tires and went to bed.
Saturday we woke up early, did some last minute work, then headed out to park expose. There were probably over 500 spectators wandering around and I was able to hang out with other drivers/co-drivers and meet a lot of new rally people (at least new to me)!
The temperatures for saturday were above freezing, so the roads were becoming quite nice, minus the handful of ice pockets scattered around. We were able to go maybe 85-90% speed due to the road conditions. Around stage 2 we found we no longer had 5th gear or reverse, but we continued on. On stage 4, we blew our front right tire and drove half the stage(2.5 miles on it.) Right outside time control, when on transit, we stopped and changed the tire, only incurring 40 seconds of penalty (10 seconds for every minute late to the next time control.) Luckily, the next time control was service, so we were able to put gravel tires on the back and put the snow tires up front.
We barely got out of service in time(something like 12 seconds to spare.) We picked up some fuel from the gas station, then headed out to stage 5. Halfway along this transit, we discovered that instead of not having 5th and reverse... we now ONLY have 5th gear! We pull over, look over the transmission and such to discover the plastic housing on the gear shifter cable that attaches to the transmission is cracked and completely non-functioning. Sweep catches up to us and we voluntarily give up our time card. Burak manually put the transmission into 2nd gear and we drive to service, at which point he put it into third and we drive back to the hotel.
We pack up the car, Burak goes to his room and passes out. I relaxed a bit, showered, then hitchhiked over to Ceremonial Finish. Kiel Saresen (sp?)'s crew gave me a ride (Irishmen can certainly be characters! (not that thats a bad thing)) and hung out at the bakery and chatted with locals until the cars came in. I hitchhiked back to the hotel (ironically being picked up by the same guys as before) and went to bed. Burak and I left at 4:40am so that I could catch my 7:55am flight.
I got home at 12:30pm sunday and have been rather out of it until this morning. All in all it was a good experience. A lot of stuff went wrong, but given the situation, I think we performed admirably. I had a lot of fun and hope to get many more opportunities to co-drive for other people. I certainly learned a lot about Burak's driving style and have lots of thoughts to help my father drive more skillfully!
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