I finished a rally!

My goals this year were, in order:

• Don’t die
• Finish the rally
• Have fun

I probably didn’t do as much car prep as I could or should have, but I did repair the damage from last year. Replaced all the broken suspension on the front left corner, replaced a bunch of a sheet metal and the busted driveshaft support bearing.

I spent a bunch of time installing the RallySafe bits, doing general maintenance and making sure I’d accounted for all the rule changes. I had various ideas for improvements/upgrades, and basically none of that happened. Mostly because I couldn’t shake the image of a crumpled rally car making any such efforts moot.

Recce the third year in a row meant that we had prior notes for all of the stages and didn’t have to write notes from scratch. The stages that were the same as 2023 were backwards, though, so that meant that the usable notes we had were from 2022. When I had absolutely no idea what an R3 over crest was.

The first stage was Valley of the Gods and the notes were rough. The stage started from a slightly different place, and our notes were truly terrible. Jack got lost reading them on recce so we marked a whole section as need-to-fix. In prior years when we messed up a corner, we’d cheat and back up a corner to fix it. Since the RSLite app was going to nag on us and disqualify us for such insanely unsafe behavior, this wasn’t an option.

We ran most of the stages once, a few of them twice, fixing up bad notes as we went. For Douglas Creek, we had Jemba notes from 2018 to start with. These were verbose, but way better than anything we created and were both confidence-inspiring and a useful tool for me. In many places, Douglas Creek better resembled a rock crawl than a road and I wasn’t sure whether my car would even make it. We didn’t run it last year at all, and the year before the car blew up before we got a chance.

We stopped to view one of the petroglyph sites near the stages.

We ended up doing Valley of the Gods 4 times in recce before we were happy with the notes. Normally, this wouldn’t have been an option, but given that we were able to do a quick single pass on the stages for which we already had notes, we could.

Parc Expose at the Rangely Car Museum was as hot and brutal as ever. The unexpected addition this year of speakers blasting bro country didn’t help things. The fact that the car museum took their 1915 American La France Speedster (which participated in the 2016 Peking to Paris Rally) out for the parade was pretty cool, though.

A rally car among rally cars:

After the parade, I checked out the car one last time. It was leaking coolant from the lower radiator hose. I have no idea why–it’s a new radiator, a new hose, and a new hose clamp. The clamp was tight, and I hadn’t touched it since last year. I replaced the clamp, and it stopped leaking.

Thursday morning we headed out of the service park toward Valley of the Gods.

We were supposed to start last, but the car that should have been in front of us was waiting for a miscalculated start time or something. So we went ahead and started ahead of them. I’m not sure what the rules are here, but I wasn’t entirely sure what to do and there were no penalties involved.

I, of course, took it easy at the start, trying to remember what it was like to drive on dirt and listen to notes. I had not managed to get into any sort of a groove by the Mile 3 where we ran into this:

That’s the volunteer manning a radio checkpoint waving an SOS sign at us. No one ever really mentioned this was a possibility, so it was a bit confusing, and the guy who stopped us wasn’t really sure what we should do anyway. Jack set up our triangles.

Information from the radio was vague, medical SOS, but maybe not a medical. It turns out that Bret Hunter had maybe managed to the roll the Zombie CRX for the last time after breaking a tie rod, winding up in a rock. The road was narrow and had quite the exposure on one side, so it’s pretty lucky they managed to stay on the road. Fortunately, the crew was uninjured, but the road was impassable, thus the SOS.

It took forever to get the road cleared and then forever for us to transit on to the next stage. We arrived at Quest for Darwin hours late–around the time we should have been leaving service for the second section.

Quest for Darwin is the stage on which we blew an engine the first year and the same stage (in the other direction) on which we crashed the second year. I’m not a superstitious person, but humans are pattern-matching animals and it’s hard not to go into it with a bit of trepidation.

It went fine. The road was full of even deeper piles of silt than I remember from either recce or previous years. There are long, fast sections through piles of silt where the front runners do 115mph. I managed 84mph before the car started sliding around enough that it seemed like I was mostly just hanging on and backed off a bit.

It managed to get miserably hot by the time we made it to Earl’s Bad Day. This stage would probably kill me without a co-driver–there are some truly misleading corners and some places that, without trying hard, you could easily go over a crest and then off the side of the mountain. I drive those sections excessively slowly, because Goal #1 remained no death.

We made it back to service with no complaints about the car. Dan looked it over, pronounced it great. We checked times and were astounded to learn that we were not the slowest car out there–we were significantly faster than the Civic in last place! We tried to hydrate and headed out for Valley of Gods the second time.

This went really well. Part of it is that we’d driven the stage a bunch in recce, part of it was that the notes were good, and part of it is that the stage isn’t insane. There are exposures and plenty of opportunities for death, but they’re not sneaky. The road is rough, but not a rock crawl. There are uphill sections, but not so uphill I have the choice of wheel spin at redline in first gear, or lugging in 2nd gear.

There were about 2 minutes where I genuinely had fun. The Hoosiers gripped way better than the Maxxis ever did. I’d removed a bunch of toe in from the front so only a smidge remained, and that helped the car turn in. I’m left-foot braking where possible and that’s helping get the car rotated. There was a long section where it felt like I was driving fast, the notes were good, and I wasn’t terrified.

We made it to the end and beat lateness….by 6 seconds. That was discouraging until I looked at the times at the end of the day and realized that we were faster on the stage than 3 cars, and pretty close behind a 4th. Actual competition! I have no idea why Rally Colorado sets lateness times such that a bunch of competitors genuinely trying can’t beat it, but it’s rough.

While waiting to check in at ATC, I generally kill the car and run the fan. It’s 95-100F and letting the car cool before each run seems to keep the temps down. I still haven’t installed a real temp gauge, so I have no idea by how much or how hot the car actually gets.

Anyway, as we approached our minute outside of ATC for Quest for Darwin the second time, I belted in, and tried to start the car and it refused. Cranked happily, but just refused to start. I double-checked that the fuel pumps were on. I cycled the ignition off and on and tried again. Nothing. Not a pop or anything. Jack said he was going to go walk our timecard in so we weren’t late. I told him not to bother, that I didn’t have any ideas. He ignored me.

I opened the hood to check for loose wiring. I didn’t see anything. I tried to start it again. Nothing. I cycled the master switch off, back on, tried to start it again. And it started. I closed the hood and picked up Jack, who’d checked in with seconds to spare. We rushed to get belted in. I think they took some pity on us and gave us a later start than they otherwise would have without a penalty, but it’s hard to know.

We were distracted for the first half of the stage, and the second half of the stage I was just miserable. It was hot, the car felt like it had less grip than the previous run, and the pacing of the notes was off. It felt terrible, but somehow we managed 7 seconds faster than our previous run.

The last stage was mostly just an exercise in fighting heat exhaustion. I was guzzling as much water as I could between stages, peeing constantly, and was completely soaked in sweat and still felt dehydrated. It was hard to concentrate and all I wanted was to get through the stage and out of the car. Which we did.

We never did figure out why the car wouldn’t start. It’s worked every time after that. Maybe just a minor hint of our Quest for Darwin curse remained.

Saturday evening was free barbecue in the park with all the teams and volunteers. I slept in a bit Sunday morning. We headed to the first running of Douglas Creek with a bit of trepidation.

The stage had been SOS’d before we got there. As we found out later, about 1.5 miles into the stage, the 3rd place car went into a “L4 tightens to L2” with only the “L4” part of the note. The driver said by the time he got the “tightens to L2” part of the note, there wasn’t much to do. They sailed off the side of the mountain and rolled 3 times coming to a rest 50 feet below the road. The stage was canceled and they took the crew to the hospital. The co-driver suffered a minor concussion, but otherwise they were fine. The crew managed to relay the cause to everyone before we ran the stage a second time, which was great, because we got to add a caution to that section of the notes so we didn’t make the same mistake.

After a long wait, we all headed to Dragon Trail. If we were going to lose a stage, I was kind of glad it was Douglas Creek, the rock crawl stage that was bound to break cars.

Even though there were only 22 cars, we were (thankfully!) running 2 minute intervals for dust. This meant a pretty good wait before we could go. For reasons I don’t understand, they instructed us all past ATC and gave us all the same impossible “ideal” start time.

The first section of Dragon’s Trail is 6 switchbacks with a steep grade. The switchbacks are too tight for 2nd gear, but 1st gear is just a spinny disaster. The grade is steep enough that the M42 barely gets the car to any speed at all before slowing again for the next one. After the initial hill climb stage though, the road is fast, smooth and usually grippy for quite awhile. This is where I do not shine–the really fast stuff scares me.

After Dragon’s Trail is Presser, a fast 1-mile stage with a few kinks and crests. They have us start on a little trail perpendicular to the road, and they let spectators line the road we didn’t use. So it’s a tight L2 in front of spectators while we get up to speed. I shifted to second before the turn, didn’t get the car to rotate and managed to look quite lame.

Still, headed back to service with nothing wrong the car and real hopes of actually finishing a rally.

While we were waiting for the start at Douglas Creek, we watched a Honda Fit climbing the massive hill at the start. “Wow. Look at how slow that Fit is going up that hill,” Jack said. “We’re going to be just as slow,” he continued. “Nope,” I said, “I think you’re wrong. We’re going to be slower.” I’m not sure if we were or not, but man was it painful. I knew that my chances of beating the turbo Subaru in front of me (which, at service, were 7 seconds ahead of) completely disappeared. They’d have no problem putting 30 seconds on us in that one straight section that we’d be doing at 20mph.

Douglas Creek was just as brutal as we’d feared. We passed the formerly 2nd place Volkswagen of Steve Bis and Kelly Keefe. Later on, after a particularly brutal rock crawl skid plate test section that I really should have slowed down more for, we passed the Subaru of Eliza Coleman and Alessandro Gelsomino.

Jack somehow not only made an off-by-one error doing the math for our check-in time at Dragon Trail, he realized it the instant the volunteer handed us our time card back. He was really upset about it, even though the one minute penalty made absolutely no difference to our finish order. At the time he was worried it might, and he felt like it was an inexcusable mistake. Given the fact that I was making mistakes at the rate of one-per-second, all of which added up to far more than a minute, I wasn’t even a little bit upset.

Our second run of Dragon’s Trail felt faster, but wound up being 20 seconds slower. I have no idea why. The second running of Presser I just kept it in first at redline around the L2 at the start, and got properly sideways for the spectators.

And then, for the first time, after 3 years of trying, we handed in our timecard at the finish. And not even the last place finisher!

It’s not traditional, but they gave champagne to all the finishers. I was going to play nice and just drink it, but Jack picked a fight that I won. It felt like we earned it.

I’m realizing that if I want to figure out how to get any good at this, I’m going to have to do it more often than once a year. And, for once, I don’t have a completely destroyed car to fix before I can do it again.

I’m thinking about the Overmountain Tennessee Rally in September…