TeamD Adventures

It’s only now, ten days after the rally, that my heart has slowed enough to allow access to a coherent memory of the event.

The driving challenge of The Thunderbird varies year-by-year, in pace with the snow cover on the roads. Before the 2010 running, we saw pre-run photos that suggested manageable levels of the white stuff, and the measuring teams’ reports posted to specialstage conformed; all the signs pointed to “one of the gentler Thunderbirds” (in the words of the Steward after a pre-running of the course).

Well, t’was not so — and that we thought it would be so, was just our pride and hubris. Late last year, after Totem, on this forum, I predicted that “some team” wasn’t far away from zeroing both days of a BC Winter rally. With renewed humility, I’ll admit that I thought we might be that team — and that the rally would be The Thunderbird.

Our run up to Merritt on Friday was uneventful, and our changeover to snow tires complete by dusk. Saturday morning, we had enough extra time to run the odo check from 2009, just to warm up. Our perfect time calculations lined up with the rallymaster’s to within four-tenths of a second. The prerequisites were falling into place, click – click – click, like the tumblers on a vault door.

This was our fourth Thunderbird. Four years ago, the naught-seven edition saw our first foray into snow rallies, and our first with real rally equipment — if  you can call a TerraTrip 1 real rally equipment (Satch calls ‘em TerrorTrips) — and we finished 40th out of 48th. Some of the many points we took that year came from stopping to pull out a car that’d slid off… on a mild downhill straight?

Who does that? It turned out to be a pair of ace ralliers. In their defense, the entire downhill was sheer ice; in our defense, we’d optimistically interpreted the Supplemental Instructions regarding helping folks who went off. The “broad-form” time dec we turned in gave the officials so little to go on that they could do little to help us, and as it was, a few hundred points saved Saturday wouldn’t have mattered in the bigger picture.

Satch and Russ won the ’07 T-Bird, by the way, in a decrepit Saab; but that story’s already been told, so let’s return to 2010.

First section on Saturday, not much snow, no problems. Zeroed it.
Hubris +1.

Second section, not much snow ’til the acute right onto the UNPLOWED section, oh boy oh boy oh boy, pass the snowplow, glad we have the HAM radio so we knew there was a snowplow, phew, no real problems. Zeroed it.
Hubris +1

Third section, fourth section, no major errors yet, wheee.
Hubris +1

Fifth section. Snow from the get-go. Acute right at Stop. Deeper snow. Now… wait for it… CAST 72.

Okay, crap, getting a little late, here’s a straight,
STAND ON IT. . . ^ . . . .. . .v . . . . .AND BRAKE LATE.

We heard that one team was (koff) for tee (koff) over cast (briefly!) catching up. Me? I’d topped off the oil level in our motor before the start, and the Engine Control Module has a soft rev-limiter built in. I ignored the tach. I planted the pedal whenever the road was clear.

Old-school-Kansas-driving-rules apply; never crest a hill unless you’re crowding the right shoulder, expect livestock or wildlife around every blind corner, but when the way is clear:: use all the road you need to.

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeett. I drug the tail in the right snowbank and didn’t let off. The rebound drug the tail in the left snowbank… but I was resolved: down, down, down ’til the numbers get right.

So we were only four-hundredths down coming into the HAIRPIN L at 18.84 km.

Not quite dark out, my eyes keenly seeking the next curving contour, then, -snap!- witness a jarring image of a person, running toward us from the road ahead. Binders full. (And, by the way, Hakka 5s == good braking.)

Mental impressions go slo-mo:

A car’s off, nose deep in the snowbank, opposite the apex, just before the bridge. . .

. . . the running figure is the navigator, deploying the warning triangle. . .

. . . don’t see the driver moving yet. . .

. . . and there’s a control car just after the bridge.

The bottom line was all that you would wish:

To our great relief, driver and co-driver were okay; and the control car, skippered by an AlCan veteran, extracted the competitor car once the rest of the field had passed; and (to tell the truth) had the car in front of us not gone  off there, we might well have: I was driving hard.

Let us give a moment of thanks for the happy endings. Aside from “absence of anyones’ injury”, driving the car home is a primary goal.

So, thereafter, we unwound ourselves, and took a time dec, and plowed on.
Hubris -20.

Snow there was on section 5, more snow than ANYBODY wanted. We curled back up the same approach for section 6 on Saturday, and no one mourned when we were given an “L at Stop” rather than the “Acute Right at Stop” that’d led into the travail.

Saturday night’s scores looked like the old Thunderbird scores: leader at 14 points? Yep, that makes sense. No ties, either. Drivers and co-drivers had good things to say about the locations of controls… “It’s how you get separation in the Unlimited class — put controls just after the hard bits”. Seems to have worked this year.