TeamD Adventures

If you only saw the results from NOBM 2009, you might have jumped to a reasonable conclusion: The overall winners ran a clean, consistent, just-a-shade-better rally than the rest.  Ho-hum, just another textbook exercise by Russ & Katy K.

Well, it wasn’t quite that way…

Russ & Katy were running Satch Carlson’s “Bad Dog”.  The Bad Dog, like all 325iXs, has four-wheel drive. Like most iXs, it has two doors. Like many iXs, it’s black.  That’s where comparisons stop, and contrasts begin.

Roll cage.  Two short words that say a lot.

Turbo by Dinan. Those three words explain the previous two.

Irresponsible Speculation fueled by Credible Rumor has it that the ‘Dog puts a bit more than double the OEM power to the wheels. Personal Observation confirms it’s got real gravel tires, but all that torque must be hard on the rubber — just a mile or so into one of the last sections, we rounded a turn and saw the black car pulled off, trunk up.  440 watts of halogen lighting let us see Russ positioning the floor jack with one hand while waving us on with the other.

We were the next car in line. We motored by, as did the next and next and next and … next cars, all the way to #22. The team in car #22 saw Russ running the jack back to the trunk as they passed.  Now, the Bad Dog was car #12. The maximum time declaration was 9:30 minutes. I’ll give you a second to do the arithmetic.

Ooo, let’s fill in a couple more details. The driver in #22 was a novice in his first rally. The navigator in #22 couldn’t be expected to know the max-time-dec vs. car-number implications; if either of them are reading this, I’ll make the bottom line clear:

The Bad Dog needed to be 30 seconds in front of your car. Otherwise, the Bad Dog would take points at the next control. The Bad Dog doesn’t like taking points.

So imagine yourself in car #22, cruising along at CAST, enjoying the road… and you start to sense that there’s a dark noisy beast following you. You see a glimpse of its lights, hear a hint of its pop-off valve. And then, …

Oh, hell, instead of spinning this tale out, I’ll just relate what they said:

We’d run wide in a right-hander. In fact, we might have gone off, except for a banked cuve of earth hugging the outside of the turn. Since we’d been driving on these roads for hours, it seemed natural to just drive on the banking around the turn. It worked great.

And then the black car streaked past us on the inside line; it was a good twenty feet away, given our position on the outside, so it was a clean pass. But then it was gone.

That was the hurtling Bad Dog, catching up to the safety of the 21 & 1/2 minute time slot. The ‘Dog took only 1’s at the last two controls.