I was wiped out, come Sunday evening! It was a weekend cram-packed with rally fun & excitement.
We kicked off the weekend with the Cascade Sports Car Club’s April Friday Night Road Rally, “We Were Left at the Tee”. Monte & Victoria Saager, who are famous for their trap rallies, wrote this very challenging rally. I was accompanied on this rally by Keri Johnson, who handled the navigation duties and her boyfriend Josh Broselle. Keri did a fantastic job, you would not have known it was her first road rally. Keri & Josh will be running as a team from next month on, and by judging on how well they picked it up, will be a team that is hard to beat.
While we didn’t get lost (which is my current benchmark for a good rally or not), we did fall for some of the traps in the rally. Three traps to be exact, for all of which we accumulated the maximum penalty points of 300 on each of those legs. We ended up with a total score of 1278 penalty points, which placed us 7th out of eight cars in SOP class (Seat of Pants). We were 14th of 24 cars overall. To put it all in perspective, the first place overall car, which was in the Unlimited Equipment Class had a 107 penalty points and 2nd place overall had 445 penalty points. The first car in our class finished with753 penalty points. On the second leg, only 2 of the 24 cars didn’t get the max penalty points. It was a very difficult rally, but alot of fun. The roads were a lot of fun to drive.
I got home from the Friday Night Rally at 12:30, which usually isn’t so bad, but this week I had volunteered to help with the Primitive Performance Driving Rally School. I had to wake up at 6 am, to be at the Washington Fairgrounds at 7am. It was fun helping out with the school, but it was a long day for only getting 5 1/2 hours sleep. It was a beautiful day without a cloud in the sky, with temperatures in the low 70′s. I have to admit the highlight of the day was playing around on the course with the instructors at lunch. I took my car out to continue to figure out how to defeat the Dynamic Stability Control, while maintaining the AWD functionality. (Which I think I did, but we’ll discuss that in another post.) I also did some ride-alongs with a couple of the instructors, which was a total blast … though it did remind me just how far I have to go in my improvement.
Photo by Ben Bradley
I finished the weekend with the Oregon Rally Group’s rallycross (2nd of eight), running in the Stock AWD class. It still amazes me the number of cars that show up for the rallycross events here in Oregon. It is such a great rally community!
It was a warm day, in the mid-to-high 70′s … great sunburn weather for a white Irish guy, such as myself. Unfortunately, they were not able to get a water truck, so the course was very dry and dusty. That is all except for the water/mud pit towards the end of the course.
The infamous mud pit.
Another view of the mud pit.
The first part of the course was very fast, not quite as bumpy as the last event, but all that changed once you hit the mud pit. Many of drivers, myself included, got a refresher course on dealing with understeer as they slid in to the deepest part of the pit. The poor people working this part of the course got their excercise chasing cones all over the place in the mud. The best of drivers lost time and NAILED cones in this challenging section.
It wasn’t until my fourth and final run that I came even close to dealing with it well. The first three profanity filled attempts saw me plow forward, seemingly forever. On the fourth run, I came to a near stop before entering the pit (seriously I dropped speed to a near stop) and crept throught he pit. My slow entry, gave me my fastest time through the pit and fasted run of the day.
My times for the day were: Run 1 – 1:21.234, Run 2 – 1:18.838 with a hit cone for a total run time of 1:20.838, Run 3 – 1:17.941 and Run 4 – 1:16.301 for a overall time of 3:55.080. I finished 14th out of 21 cars in class and 34th of 52 cars overall.
The results from the last two events have shown that there is no way for me to be competitive in the Mazda CX-7, it is just too heavy and has too high a center of gravity. So I am hoping in the next month or two to pick up a new car more suited for rallycross. (Within our tiny budget).
It was a fantastic weekend full of rally fun, the only bummer of the weekend was the time and $20 of quarters it took to clean the mud off the car at the Spray and Wash.
-Dave
