TeamD Adventures

Up here in the Northwest corner of the United States, June hosts the No Alibi rally, put on by the Rainier Auto Sports Club, to which a good number of TeamD members belong.  Some of us participated in the rally while others were involved in the organization/running of the event.  I will leave it to others to talk about keeping on time and on route as I was the designated scoring chauffeur(1).  We also worked a few checkpoints each day, when our schedule allowed us to leapfrog the competitors and I took  a few photos (Day 1 and Day 2).

Near the end of Day two, mother nature provided us with a grand water splash.  The route book kept the speeds down but even so, some of the more “adventurous” cars got a good soaking and, in a few instances, the cars (mostly Subarus in a trend reminiscent of the water problems experienced by the Subaru WRC team in 2006).  My excuse is that my passenger was very busy dealing with the scoring (trying to keep the wait at the end to a minimum) and as such I didn’t get the benefit of the stated CAST or the warning that a water crossing was coming up.  The end result was a surprised driver, water over the hood and roof, a “rather loud bash” and a much slower WRX exiting the other side of the water.

A few hundred yards past the water we encountered the first of a few sadly disabled cars.  The Impreza radiator sits on plastic (?) mounts in the front of the engine compartment.  The mounts are fully strong enough to take normal driving but aren’t really up to the task of holding things together when bombarded with thousands of pounds of water.  And so in at least three cases they failed which caused the radiator to spew water out the bottom hose.  Aaak.

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Up early Sunday to check the Saab: no flats, started OK.  We were ready to roll.

Sunday’s route was far different from Saturdays and last year’s.  Sure, there were some great paved country roads and short gravel sections to start, but then about mid-morning, the roads began to look familiar — and not in a comforting way.  The course began to follow some sections from the ‘2008 The Road Not Taken’ rally.

We started to worry. We remembered the rally-ready cars that that TRNT broke.   Worry turned into perspiration and then cursing.   When we came upon a section with huge potholes that spanned the road, that was enough.   We called it quits, not wanting to become the 4th DNF.  We  headed for pavement and home.

This year’s 500 illustrated the paradox of the rally format: are you to bring the worst car possible, and let the rocks fall where they may?  A couple teams did, the best(?) example being the $100 Toyota. Or are you to bring the nicest car possible, and try to preserve it? In this camp have to be the two XJ-6s, as well as a v. v. nice&shiny RX-7. Before you suspect that the rallymaster let the fools rush in where angels fear to tread, note that his was the nicer of the Jags. He wasn’t tip-toeing.

So the 500’s a mystery to me. I thought I understood it last year, but just when you think you’ve got the rally game figured out, there’s a new twist.

That’s 500 km to travel, and no more than $500 in the car to qualify.

The entry list:

- 2 Jaguar XJ6s - mismatched body parts, one gas tank rusted through

- 2 Mazda RX7s (1st gen)

- (non)Reliant K - blown head gasket, dnf

- Fiat 124 - dnf, didn’t make it 10 miles

- Orange Pinto Station Wagon - dnf, blown head gasket

- 1978 Flat Black Pinto Runabout (license BLK DTH) - orange flames and simulated injector bolted to hood. Also has a ‘flammable gas’ sticker on the hatchback.

- VW Vanagon - 2 tires going flat in the parking lot, right now. Tail happy on loose stuff.

- 1997 VW Passat - mismatched hood and dent in roof and lingering “moisture” problem inside (result of the hood blow back/windshield blowout/sat out in the rain for 2 months incident)

- 1972 Mercury Marquis Tunaboat (429) - “Best Use of Metal” winner

- 1982 Toyota Corolla - T-bone victim, moss green (not the paint color), fender pulled out with a come-along and a walnut tree. It is filthy, smelly and slow.

- The Saab 900 - best running car and fastest in the rally; –what is this car doing here?

No checkpoints, just drive to the finish. What a hoot! More tomorrow!

The low tire warning light’s cause wasn’t made clear ’til this morning, when the other rear tire was squoshy. Thankfully, the Grand Canyon Garage leaves their air hose out when they’re closed, which they were when we headed south at 6 a.m. Made the airport with only three more stops for pressure.

But ’twas all for naught: our 737 has an overheated friberitzer valve, and it ain’t going anywhere. If we’re lucky we’ll get out on the next bird, but it’s delayed too for mechanical problems… hoping to reach PDX by 11:59 p.m. and terminate this ordeal.

We are SO looking forward to No Alibi.

Footnote:  We boarded the plane 3 times (and disembarked 2 times) before finally taking off 7 hours after our flight was supposed to leave.  We rolled into PDX at midnight.   It’s good to be home.

Well after a tough Day 4, Marinus decided to tear apart the external sending unit and mount a bracket and sensor on the car with magnets.  That did the trick. I set the factor at the end of the tire warmup.   It jumped from 27000 to 69000. The odo section factor was only 900 higher.  The mileage in the book matched to the .002.   We ran the 1st section with almost no adjustments.

We call this rally, the rally of ‘CAST AT MILEAGE’ as there are few hard references.  With the sensor remount, my workload in the car dropped about 70%.  Suddenly we were getting 0s, 1s again.  The lack of hard references had made it impossible to keep on time using the 798 with the bad sensor unit.

We thought we were in the clear at the beginning on the last section of day 5.   The low tire indicator came on again.  We held our breath and kept going, hoping that our turn to work a control would come up soon.   But it didn’t until the very end of the section.  But the tire held and we nursed it into town.

We only got 52 points on Friday. Overall we came in 3rd in the EQUIPPED class and 4th overall.  Mapleback/Von Kaenel finished first overall.  The rally was tough, but we got a break at the end and finished on a good note.