TeamD Adventures

For No Alibi this year, I changed seats, and ran as a navigator with Steve Perret . Steve’s got years of autocross experience and done thousands of miles on stage rally roads, which is why his nickname is “Smooth”. With so little experience co-driving, my nickname last weekend would have been “Spaz”.

We ran in the Equipped class. In the week before the rally, I updated my TimeDrivenOdo software with a fresh set of bugs and additional user-interface shortcomings. When conditions were right, it let me give Steve time-error feedback around eight times a mile. When conditions weren’t right, it let me give Steve urgent gibberish at fifty phonemes a minute. A less patient and forgiving driver’d have stopped to thrash me with sagebrush boughs.

I’m left with a fresh appreciation for the work of a competent co-driver, and greater respect for Equipped teams. It takes a lot of effort to translate calcs into time error, and then more effort to communicate the info with the driver.

No Alibi flaunted the deserted, challenging, and scenic roads of the Palouse, with a nifty ratio of TSD to TRN in its 500+ miles. Three spots in particular wowed me:

Late Saturday, in the middle of Section #8
Know what happens if the co-driver directs a stop at the end of a FREE ZONE where there’s no extra time?
You begin the CATCH UP.
While I sat stupidly bewildered because the time for our departure wasn’t in the future, car #2 pulled up behind us. Good thing my driver’s run course opening car for the Wild West performance rally; he knew Tatman Mountain Road well.

First thing Sunday morning, down The Spiral Highway
Have you seen this thing?

Sheldon Coles, car #29, was watching from the viewpoint above, and could see eight cars on-route at once, like a performance of synchronized swimming. The rallymaster picked a CAST that was too slow for the straights and too fast for the many, many, many curves — a perfect CAST, in other words.

Sunday afternoon, somewhere south of I-90
The sequence of instructions went something like this:

121 CAST 46
122 PB (paddleboard, a type of sign)
123 ACUTE LEFT at YIELD
. . . R at hairpin

Oh- wait; that last one wasn’t given. Rather, as you made the acute left, you could see the problem.

There’s a checkpoint car ahead on the right.
+ We’re essentially stopped
+ The CAST’s pretty high
=================
= ??

It would seem a simple dragstrip run could solve this equation. But loose gravel put another twist in — even cars with enough power on tap couldn’t put it to the ground. And… remember the hairpin right? Just as you passed the timing line, with your driver still set on MAX_ACCEL, it became necessary to move to MAX_DECEL to set up for the right. I heard plenty of tales from other teams a’ rounding that corner, tales filled with drama and verve. In our car, Steve had the iX pivoting like a dancer, and we were merely late.

Everybody was late. Or, more accurately, “later”.

Some teams were running so early before this control that they were still early at the end of the dragstrip. To find out who lost the least time, I looked at the delta between the crews’ lateness-or-earliness at the previous control versus their lateness-or-earliness at this one. In this sweepstakes, there was a four-way tie for second place between cars 4, 5, 10, and 21. Pretty good performance by all those teams.

But the winners on that short chute were racecar driver Tom Kreger and up-and-coming Unlimited navigator Cynthia Bushell, who managed to drop only two seconds. This bit of virtuoso driving, combined with their third-best-overall score for Sunday, hints that the UNL class won’t be getting easier any time soon.

Maybe I’ll stay in Equipped. Oh, Steeeeve…