2009 Open Road Rally Nov 1st out of Perth

[STeveD]

http://www.mco.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10591

November 1st, 2009
Out of Perth Ontario (1 hr west of Ottawa)
Perth Restaurant, 23 Gore Road, Perth
Park in back.

09:30 registration starts
11:00 Car 0 starts

Downside: Okay, so it's a 4.5 hour drive just to get there, for a rally that should be about 200km / 4 hours. Then we have to hike back.

Upside: The clocks go back an hour the night before, so although it SEEMS like you're waking up at 5:00am, it's really only 6:00am! Robert's going to put us on some of the best roads in the province! And, we get to see who wins the Novice driver's championship at that event!

[STeveD]

Seven days left to Open Road! If you missed the opportunity to do the Lanark Highlands rally in years past, Open Road is PROBABLY going to take us to many of those good roads. It's beautiful country!

[Opal]

AWESOME driving yesterday (a gravol-required event for most of the navs I talked to... and some of the drivers too!). It was a nail-bitter finish between Team: T2 and Team: SO-what?

(I'll let Steve and his uber summary cover this one).

I've got to say, the new tires Steve's got on Old Smokey were amazing on gravel yesterday. She put in an impressive performance!

[STeveD]

Open Road was do or die for Opal and I; the best I could achieve was a full win to tie Trevor for first in the ORRC Novice series. Anything less, would be a failure and 2nd in the championship. Battling through eight events, including running one by myself, this is what it came down to! This would also be important for Opal; having missed President's Prize with the flu. A win here would tie her with Ted and make First Frost in December their final battle.

Not only did Open Road take us to those nice roads in Lanark Highlands, it also did so with quite some pace! Surprisingly enough, it was even early on! Due to the challenging drive in this rally, Robert decided to use only simple tulips for the whole rally, and keep it simple for the navigators.

The day before the rally I decided to switch from Blizzak WS-50's at the wear bars to a brand new set of WS-60's with cuts for snow. Turns out, the cuts also did a decent job with loose gravel at speed!

Best moment of the rally? Ol' Smokey's little 2.2L screaming at 6000 RPM in first as she clawed her way up a right hand uphill with the right front tire spitting stones across the hood and windshield while while I was counter steering the oversteer... Priceless!

The mileage was dead on with the Terratrip all day, but unfortunately the average speed indicator carried error from previous frequent resets and wasn't always as reliable as it should be. It was fair, and I was glad I had it, but it wasn't as reliable as a Timewise (not legal for our novice class.) I'm looking forward to intermediate next year!

CP1 we zeroed, which was a little confusing to do because there were incorrect distances in the Section 1 ODO check which was probably an organizer mistake that the Green Crew must have missed. It happens. I think one new team got lost because of it, but eventually found their way back.

CP2 bugged me a bit. We saw it around a corner and we were running slightly early (as I wanted to be.) So I slowed, weaved the car left and right to show that we were still moving, then the CP worker stuck his hand out the window and waved us up. I wasn't sure if it was for safety, (or if we were late and he was trying to be helpful), but it didn't matter. If a motorsport "official" gives you a direction, you obey. So I drove past his CP board earlier than I wanted to, and sure enough... he marked me at that time that we crossed, which I knew was early. What The Hell? Not kosher action from a CP worker. But that's a real problem when you have CP workers using their tiny side view mirrors to judge car approach, and you don't know if they're new volunteers or not. We took a -0.1 early and I just hoped that I wouldn't regret not arguing about this.

Let it go... it's a long rally, it's only CP2, and it's only 0.1.

CP3 was after some higher speed wonderful weavy road sections that put me a couple of seconds behind. It was in an open stretch to the CP Car and Ol' Smokey gave it her all to get there, but it was still 2 seconds too slow and we took a 0.1. That was my fault. Opal told me we were behind a couple of minutes back and I just wasn't enthusiastic enough about bringing the pace back up quickly enough.

This next section was the trickiest, for speed and road heaves, and it was then that I realized how bad Opal was still feeling after the H1N1 flu. Yes, contageous phase was well past, but her lungs and breathing were still affected. About 10km into this phase she warned me that she was feeling quite nauseous, which is unusual for her especially after the Gravol she had. Opal had been doing perfect timing up until that point which meant looking down at the notes and doing lots of time calculations, which meant she couldn't look at the horizon. I asked her if she wanted me to back off a bit and she said no, keep pushing, she'd warn me if we needed to stop. But she'd have to stop doing timing checks for a bit and we had to go off the CAS meter only.

Soon we caught up to Peter Brownhill from MCO in the FWD Mazda who was running with a new navigator. With the loose gravel, the FWD, and probably a sick navigator, it wasn't surprising that he was struggling to hit CAS. He let us by the first time the road was straight and wide enough, though we still had to put two wheels in the brush to pass, and we were trying to get back up to CAS. Soon thereafter we passed two oncoming vehicles (a tractor and a pickup truck) and the road was wide enough that we didn't have to lift.

Then we came up on Trevor's STi. I must admit, there was a moment of glee in the car! We didn't know why he had dropped back 7 minutes from his target time, whether Ted was sick (probable if Opal was) or whether there was a navigational error... (we found out after the rally that an angry local stopped them in the middle of the road. It's happened to us before as well, but that's why we have the Time Allowance system.) Either way, not only did we know that they'd be forced to use a T.A., but it was also obvious that they were unable to maintain CAS (which we were doing) because we were closing the gap quickly.

They didn't hold us up much at all and they were gone from the rearview pretty quick. I knew that his wide snow tires on that loose gravel must not be fun, esepecially with the STi weighing 430lbs more than Ol' Smokey. Small dance of joy because Opal's nausea (and stamina... she STILL wasn't telling me to slow down or back off in the corners) was validated. Bonus points for stubborn competitive chick! ;-)

Unfortunately, there was another local car or rally worker as well, and this string of following others had hurt our momentum; which is essential in poor Ol' Smokey. No one had held us up much, but we were showing a 60.X Average Speed where I was supposed to have been doing 63 for what I guessed was at least 5 km's. And that's when we had our worst moment of the rally. The CP came up around the corner, Opal was too nauseous to calculate how far behind we actually were, and we had to guess at a TA value. We had always been good at this in the past... the first TA was free... we knew T2 would have to take at least one TA as well so... I decided on 30 seconds ... the lowest value you can take.

I looked at the sticker... ARGH! Again, we were only TWO SECONDS behind a Zero!! So our 0.1 late just turned into a -0.4 early. Damn! I should have known better. Don't take a TA unless you're SURE!! I couldn't do the math in my head but a 3km/h difference over 5km would have only been 14.5 seconds slow... with the six second window for a CP, there's no way I should have taken that TA. Insult to injury? It was only about 3km since the last CAS reset, and the speed differential was only a little over 2km/h. Dumb, dumb, dumb.... I REALLY hoped that I didn't just hand T2 the rally with my decision. We were only four CP's in and we already had accumulated 0.6 points... that's risky against Trevor and Ted, no matter how they were challenged!

All of this mental anguish at the CP car while poor Opal had some dry heaves out the passenger door. Right in front of Ted, who had pulled in behind us, so hopefully Ted felt some camaraderie in his suffering, as he was looking pretty grim too. Lowered head in his hands, and breathing through his mouth.

Then Jane Leonard walked by our car and smiling said "Your brakes are burning."

"Are you sure it's us?" I asked. I could smell the oil burning on our manifold, but I didn't think we'd heated up the pads that much. "Yup!" she said as she walked by, "It's you!!"

Great...

There was a long line up of cars ahead of us at that CP, and more came in behind us, so that CP was pretty backed up. We actually had a 7 minute break instead of the 1.9 minutes we should have had. Incredibly, this was enough for Opal to settle her stomach, and then be fine for the whole rest of the rally! The worst was over for her. I couldn't believe it, because I sure don't recover quickly once I feel nauseous as a navigator. In retrospect, yeah, she was probably lying to me about how she felt to make sure that I wouldn't back off and risk being late again. THAT's a real navigator.

The rest of Section 4 was smoother; fewer heaves, with generally lower speeds including a brutally frustrating 25km/h that was over 3km long, followed by a 35km/h, then 40km/h. But you know what? It lulled me into submission. When the pace picked back up, my driving lagged slightly and we came in three seconds late to CP 5 taking another 0.1 penalty. We had been held up briefly by a Golf that was local or a CP worker, but I should have been able to pick it back up.

We perfectly zeroed CP 6 in Section 5. Yay! Checking the sticker at CP 7, it was another perfect zero. The CP was visible from a distance at the side of the road. There was a little confusion though... I didn't check our Time Out closely, only time in. I guess that this CP worker was a new volunteer because he didn't write our time out properly... he only wrote 14400 as our time out. Opal caught it and said, "What? This is before we arrived at 14:40:30??" she sent me back to the CP car and I asked what our time out was supposed to be. Apparently 14:41:00. ? "What? That's not legal... you can't put us out on the same minute when it's a timed to the tenth CP!!" I then told the CP worker that we were going out at 14:42:00, which should have been the proper out time. He adjusted his sheet and I barely had time to run back to the car and belt in before we were off. Fortunately, there was no close CP to that one, or we'd have been caught behind.

Section 6 was on the way back to the finish, and things were a little funky time-wise. The distances of the CAS changes / CAS reading and the seconds +/- on the Rallycalc software weren't quite matching up. We were a little confused, but the math was right. We didn't know it, but Ted was finding the same thing in their car.

We saw CP8 around the bend and made our best guess about when to cross. I actually crossed 1 second late for the minute 18.1 time it was supposed to be, but again it was an inexperienced CP worker who somehow wrote it down as crossing 9 seconds earlier at 03 seconds instead of 12. There were scratched out times all over his CP log.

Either way, it didn't matter; I knew we were off the target time by 1 second, so 0.1 for a total of 0.8 points. Argh... This was going to be close.

We zeroed the finish CP back at the Perth restaurant and ordered lasagna as we waited for results. It wasn't looking good as the partially finished scoring showed T2 had only accumulated 0.3 over the first four CP's; half what we managed. It was a long drawn out wait as T2's scores were pretty much the last to go up on the final board, but it was good news. They had some troubles later in the rally and took a 1.0 as their final score. We had managed to beat them by less than 12 seconds over that four hour nightmare/dream of twisty roads, traffic, and CP struggles. WooHoo!!

Other SPDA / NCSC members told us what a good time they had, and that they'll be running the Open Road series in Ottawa next year. They struggled, but it was worth it in the end and they'll be back.

The drive home with the sun setting through Westport was beautiful! The 401 traffic; not so much. Sub 100km/h in the left lane with little traffic?? Eesh. But we were still home before 8:30pm. A wonderful day trip!

[TrevorH]

Congrats to Steven for being the second 1st Place Novice Driver.

Early in the rally we stopped to talk to an angry roadside resident, upset over the rally's being run over (not) his roads and excessive speeds (below the speed limit). He was pretty upset and flagging everyone down, so it was better that one of us talk to him rather than have some incident here. As a result, we lost a lot of time, and slowed our pace (letting Team SO-What? by) to be able to take an exact TA, which zero'd the section for us. I wasn't too worried about falling back the distance, as starting as car 5, we were well within the CP window. Besides, what better way to mess with Team SO's heads than to let them see us falling back?

The 2008 STI running on Hankook I-Pike winters were great in the gravel. Running with auto-rear bias on the centre diff and TCS/STB turned off we were able to carve through corners with ease. We'd made a navigational error on an early section (damn two sided instruction notes), and lost over a minute, which we were able to make up traveling over CAS on the long technical section early in the rally.

The pace on those roads proved a bit nauseating for Ted (also recovering from a cold), and we stopped about a third of the way through the rally to allow Ted some upchuck time, taking a 1.5 TA for that stop.

Most of the rally ran without incident, and we gave up only a few .1's here and there until the end. Starting section 6, somehow I'd changed my odo from trip meter A to B, rather than zeroing the A meter. We discovered the error just up the road, but I estimated that we were exactly at 40.00 on the ODO when we started the section, so we just made the adjustment and carried on. The estimate was a little off though, which proved our undoing. Just before the last CP we'd turned onto a road but had to slow to verify we were on route, by the time we'd verified our course, we were running over 20 seconds late, but didn't calculate our lateness until we were within site of the last CP. I gunned it to the CP to try to make up the time, but it wasn't enough, so we took a .4 , which brought our rally total up to 1.0.

I'm happy with the score, but it was just a bit short of the mark to keep Steve from sharing the season podium. Obviously, not stopping at Wimpy's for Blueberry Pancakes / Waffles had a negative affect on our performance.

Thanks to Robert, and Glen and the others for running a great rally. We had an awesome time.

[STeveD]

Looks like the 2010 novice battle may come from our Ottawa guys:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2622/4069234545_702985f374.jpg


LOVE to see the friendly competition within the club. :cheer:

[STeveD]

The whole scoreboard, courtesy of Johnny:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2762/4072425402_0eeed6a8e2_o.jpg