I survived my 5th Rally Colorado. This was the first year it was a National, and the organizers did about as well as could be hoped given the circumstances. This rally is just brutal. Every year I forget just how hard it is, and every year there’s some new fresh hell. Tennessee is the only other rally I’ve ever done, but it was so easy in comparison.
This year temperatures were forecast to be in the upper 90s as usual. Colorado has had record low snowpack and Rangely seemed even drier and dustier than usual. The organizers struggle to put together enough stages for a 2-day rally. Last year, we lost Douglas Creek because of the number of cars that just couldn’t survive it. Huge ruts and basketball-sized rocks make any kind of speed quite difficult–it’s the stage that broke my 1/4″ aluminum skid plate. So last year we had a new stage that was great, but the transit involved us going to Utah and back through a foot of nearly impassable silt. This year, they opted to run one of the stages in both directions, something we’ve never done before.
The already-brutal stages get really chewed up after 25 cars go through twice. Having 70 cars go 4 times felt like a lot to ask of Valley of the Gods (Gods of the Valley) the other way.
Despite having notes for almost everything, we decided to write new ones from scratch. This was mostly because we attended OZ Rally Pro’s codriver/driver training when they were here in Colorado and realized how we’d basically been doing everything wrong. This year, instead of guessing each corner’s severity, I did a bunch of math for the Tacoma vs the Jemba standard radius for turns 1-6 and marked up the steering wheel. I put the Monit rally computer in the Tacoma in KM mode so I could read off the distances instead of guessing.
Rhianon stressed that you should do recce at 30mph without slowing down or stopping. This proved impossible on the first pass and probably made Jack angrier at me than I’ve seen him before. We also know we should be doing video review after recce, but we just didn’t have the energy. Still, we ended up with much more consistent notes in terms of turns/distances. Unfortunately, I did a pretty terrible job of adding important decorations on the second pass. Fortunately, that meant less words for me to get lost in on stage.
We started recce on Thursday afternoon and things went about as expected until we hit some pretty light rain on our second pass of Valley of the Gods. “What’s that noise?” I asked Jack. “Mud,” he responded. Even though there was very little water at all, it was enough to turn the top layer of super-fine dust into mud. At first it was crazy how much was being picked up and tossed into the wheel wells. And then I turned the steering wheel and nothing happened.
This mud is slicker than ice. With the Tacoma in 4wd, I was able to crawl along, but our second pass recce was nearly useless. I was doing all I could do to just keep the car on the road. And then we hit traffic.
I’ve always been annoyed at doing recce in the Tacoma–it’s way too high so the picture is wrong. I have to guess which brows are crests at rally-car height and I’m jealous of folks who have a proper recce car. Until now.
First we passed Michelle Miller and Richo who were stopped on top of a crest. They said they weren’t stuck yet, but weren’t sure they could get around the car in front of them that was stuck. So we went to help the folks in the stuck car. I didn’t recognize them, but the driver was a kid who didn’t seem old enough to drive. We towed them to the top of the next hill, where I was pretty sure it was all downhill from there and they’d be okay. They were quite thankful. It turns out–I was right, the driver isn’t old enough to drive. It was Mika Block who is only 15 years old.
After a mile or so, conditions improved dramatically and we came across Pastrana and Gelsomino, stuck in the middle of the road. Travis explained that a tow wasn’t really what they needed–they were stuck because of the mud packed in their wheel wells was so severe that they couldn’t continue. The now-freed Mika and his codriver hopped out to help, so we moved along.
Parc Expose was crazy. Usually it feels like half the town is there to support a couple-dozen cars, but that amounts to a couple hundred people at most. This year, there were at least that many people in line to get an autograph from Travis. They couldn’t even fit all the cars in the museum parking. The crappy BMWs were relegated to the overflow parking in the street:
Normally, Rally Colorado starts with the first car out around 10am. Now that there were 70 cars, the first car out was at 8:30am. An extra dust minute is pretty much always required in Colorado, so I still had a pretty late start. I was sort of surprised that we were able to start the first stage, Dragon Trail, because it just feels like typically someone sends it way too hard on the first stage before I get there. I was trying to get used to being back in the car, it having been 9 months since the last time, and was starting to feel comfortable again when I drifted a bit too far from the line toward the inside and hit this rock:
The car started pulling to the left immediately, and I hoped that a flat was the worst of it. I was able to limp along for the next 4 miles, so I didn’t stop. All things considered, I decided I’d rather avoid changing a flat on stage, at my pace it was going to take me longer to swap the tire than we were going to save. Thanks to the dust minute, no one behind us caught us and we were able to pull off at the start of the next transit to swap the flat.
That’s when I realized it was 2 flats. I have only a single spare in the car. At that point, I basically gave up and sent a text to the crew to come get us, resigned to a retire and rejoin. Jack was not on board with that plan and changed the tire himself in no time at all while I tried to get a text out with almost no signal. “We’ll see if someone will loan us their spare,” he said.
“In a world of Subarus, you think someone with a 4×100 in an offset that clears the brake rotors is just going to show up?”
Right then, a VW Scirocco that should have started in front of us, but didn’t for some reason, pulled up. “Here’s your 4×100,” Jack said. I started removing the second wheel while Jack went over to beg a spare. Giving up your spare in a rally feels insanely risky given how common flats are, but these folks were game! The wheel bolted on no problem and we were off.
Somehow, a first-stage ending event was suddenly no big deal. We wound up 4 minutes late to the next stage, which is only a 40 second penalty. Still in it!
The next 2 stages actually went really well. I remarked that attrition was way lower than I expected and that things were going surprisingly well overall. We got the spare tire returned to the crew we’d borrowed it from, but learned the VW was stuck on stage. I had a horrible feeling that they’d had a flat and we’d stranded them–but it turned out not to be the case. They’d snapped a tie rod which resulted in an impact that broke a control arm. Felt bad for them, but was really glad that their generosity hadn’t cost them. We looked over the left side suspension at service, but everything looked fine and we headed back out.
Second run of Valley of the Gods went a lot better than the first and I was pretty happy with how the car was feeling. This is the first year I’ve run Rally Colorado on the new “Hard” Hoosiers instead of the old extra hard, and I wonder if that made a significant difference. The roads were also freshly graded and smoother than they’d ever been. In any case, it seemed like the car was doing better and I was in more control than ever before so I was starting to push harder and even having some fun.
As we pulled into SS5, there were clearly more cars than there should have been. We were stopped on a pretty steep hill, so I killed the car and set the parking brake. I’ve got a simple lock valve as a parking brake in the rear brake line. Step on the pedal, turn the valve and the brake is set. I did that, but it started rolling back. Did it again, harder, and the pedal slowly went to the floor and brake fluid sprayed out of the top of the parking brake valve.
About then, someone came by to tell us the stage was canceled and we’d be transiting. This was a bit of a relief and I screwed with the brake valve and realized that with it closed, it didn’t actually leak much. That meant no rear brakes, only front, but safe enough to transit for sure. No word about why the stage was canceled, but I’m used to rally folks providing zero information until after the fact. We later found out there was a medical event at SS6 and they needed the ambulance from SS5.
When we got to SS6, I’d committed to running the stage on front brakes only. My depowered brakes already require way more force than I feel like is reasonable, and the new braking effort was huge. I was going to run the stage slowly so that I didn’t die, but hopefully stay in it. Then, thankfully, SS6 was canceled as well. We later found out that there was, supposedly, a medical event as well as a lightning-caused fire on the stage. Then it started raining, and this was Valley of the Gods, the same stage that was a disaster during recce. The fire department couldn’t get to the fire because of the conditions, but fortunately Brett and his team were able to put it out.
While we were waiting for instructions, I was mucking around in the trunk trying to find some tools to make sure that tightening the bad brake valve wouldn’t work. Jack yelled at me to stop whatever I was doing, that the magic smoke was escaping. I poked my head in the car to see that there was quite a bit of smoke coming from under the dash on his side of the car. I switched the master switch off, and the smoke cleared, but this also felt potentially rally-ending.
I found a very toasty wire and cut it. Wasn’t sure what it went to, but figured I’d try my luck. Flipped the master switch on and no fire. Flipped things on one at a time and discovered that the cut wire was, apparently, to the radiator fan. Not a thing I wired, but clearly there wasn’t enough over-current protection on that circuit. The car cools fine on transit as long as I’m moving without the fan, so we were able to head back to service without further drama, just sans radiator fan or rear brakes. I was quite glad of the canceled stages, for once.
In fact, I couldn’t believe my luck. I’ve had a pile of bad luck at rallies over the years, but finally it seemed like things were working out. We were able to remove the offending brake valve in service and track down the short. It turns out it was the codriver light, which got squirted with brake fluid, apparently triggering the short.
Day 2 started with a bulletin that the start would be delayed by 1 hour so that the officials could assess the course conditions after the rains the evening before.
One of the stages was so badly washed out that they canceled both runs preemptively and issued a bulletin with new transit instructions. Unsurprisingly, before we ever left service, there was a “medical event” on the first stage of the day and it was canceled, too. With not much more information, we watched the flight for life helicopter land at the Rangely hospital and hoped for the best. It turns out the driver suffered some broken bones but was otherwise alive, which was good news. I think it was after 1pm before we finally left the service park to head to the 3rd stage.
Once again, by the time we got there, the stage was canceled. We transited back to the service park for the most boring rally loop ever. I thought I heard a weird suspension noise, so we poked around at that during service, but otherwise we mostly were just waiting to get released to actually run a stage.
At this point, I’d been made aware of a very unusual thing: we were P3 in regional L2WD. Mostly attrition, but even more surprising, we were 10 seconds behind P2, a team in a 1987 Golf GTI. Competition! This basically never happens to me at a rally.
I was suitably motivated to both drive hard, as well as try not to break the car on our first actual stage of the day. Which turned out to be our penultimate stage as well. The Golf team was on the road directly ahead of us and we compared while queued up for ATC on the final stage. We’d pulled ahead by about 10 seconds!
I’m not especially competitive by nature, but now it was on. I drove the hardest I ever have on the final stage, while still trying to leave room for my inevitable mistakes. It was going really well, and at the last quarter of the stage we started to catch dust. At first, I assumed it was the Golf in front of us, and if we were catching their dust, that meant I could relax, because we’d gained 2 minutes on them.
We got closer and realized it was not the Golf at all, but the car that had started in front of them. We furiously pushed the push-to-pass on the Rally Safe and they let us by after about 30 seconds. Who knew whether we’d been held up more than they had?
It turns out we were faster than they were on the final stage by over a minute. We exchanged hugs in parc ferme–congratulating each other on a great drive. New friends just because we had a great battle on the dirt. Both of us were just stoked to have someone at the back to race with, and on top of that, we both wound up on the podium! I think if this had happened at an early rally, I wouldn’t have been nearly so happy about it. Winning because of attrition rather than outright speed feels a bit hollow in most racing, but in rally? Just finishing is a victory. The champagne tasted great.
