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.

It’s a nice feeling, fixing your own car. First, you’re saving money; and when you hear your co-workers mourning the cost of their last service, you feel even better. But it’s not just the money — repairing machinery makes you feel… wise… and capable; you feel talented. It’s a nice boost to the ego.

Ah, but there’s another side to that coin, you know. If you get in there, and you make a mistake, you feel stupid.  In fact, you feel stupid on two levels: one, you should have known not to press on that thing that you pressed on (substitute “pry”, or “trim”, or “pull”, or “cut” until the shoe fits), and two, you should have known a priori that this particular repair was beyond you.  This repair should have been given to the folks with the special tools and secret books: the techs at the dealer.

Apropos of nothing, have I told you about my modern German techno-car? Have I described its multiplexed communications channel for control of accessories? Did I already mention the MOST-bus that connects the “automotive media devices”?  If I’ve not raved about it yet, you should know that the MOST-bus covers about 4 of the 7 OSI layers. It’s slightly intimidating, to tell the truth.

Look: all I want to do is play my iPod through the stereo. How hard can that be?

Well, there are two answers to that. If you just want to control the tune that’s playing with the iPod’s touch wheel, and you’re satisfied with a few hours of music on a iPod charge, it’s simple. Plug in a stereo mini cable and you’re done.

But if you want to charge the iPod while it’s in the car, or change the track or playlist with the radio controls, or maybe see the track or artist name on the radio’s character display…  then you need to interface with the MOST-bus. Thankfully, BMW has anticipated your need! And they’ve produced an accessory MOST-interface box! And you can buy this, yes, from a dealer, as a kit!  It comes with instructions!

Mmmm… yes… it comes with a little booklet bound in cool, white, semi-glossy paper reminiscent of the owner’s manual. The booklet is the “end user” documentation:

How to play a tune. How to change volume. How to plug in your iPod.

The kit does not come with installation instructions… of any sort. That omission sends a pretty clear message:

The owner is not expected to install this.

To be fair, there’s a portion of the installation that most people, of whatever skill level, will be completely unable to do: reprogramming the car’s command and control system to recognize the new device on the MOST-bus. That takes special electronic equipment only found at BMW dealers.

But you could, theoretically, install the hardware and wiring, and simply take the car in for reprogramming
– if you were mechanically inclined
– if you had past experience in automobile dealership service departments installing accessories
– if you found the real installation instructions somewhere.

I am, I do, and I did.

So I thought I’d “save” the hour’s labor charge that the dealership wanted to install the hardware & wiring. I gathered my tools and went to work. Draw now the curtains in your imagination, and race forward in time to that point where I admitted defeat and began backing out. Never mind the nature of the insurmountable obstacle that turned me back; what’s important is the next bit. After the trim was all back on, and the battery reconnected, I started the car to verify that it still operated.

And a new warning light came on, one I’d never seen lit before. It trumpeted that the 4×4 system was inoperative, and – more than that – it screamed that some fumblefingers had been touching things he oughtn’t.  Key off, battery disconnected, trim back off, double-check all connections, reassemble:  4×4 warning light shining still, like the sun at midday.

Ohhh, the angst, the agony, the self-torture and self-loathing I felt then. “Save” money? Hah! I’d be paying for that hubris, in spades! I dreaded the report I must give to the service advisor: “I tried to do something myself, and I think I broke something somehow.”  My confidence was shattered. My spouse was kind but I thought I saw, even there, a flicker of disdain for my weak skills and my smug arrogance.  Twice times stupid — that’s me.

The car came back from the dealer this week, with the MOST-interface installed and the systems reprogrammed and the 4×4 warning light dark. The iPod works great.  Want to know what caused the warning light?

Bad steering angle sensor.

It’s in the column, nowhere near where I was working; couldn’t have been damaged by anything I touched. It was a mere coincidence that it failed while I was tearing apart the dash.   Just. A. Coincidence.

Did a double take when we saw this while walking around NE Portland.

Veterans and Novices

Normally the previous year’s winners are assigned Car #1; running that spot is equal parts honor and duty.

The honor should be obvious, pride of place wot wot. And there are benefits to running up front: you never have to wait in line for the pump at the gas stops; the locals that you see still have no idea that their road is hosting a mass migration of four-wheelers; the low, wet spots on the section aren’t chewed into mudholes; where there’s snowpack, it isn’t all shiny and slick; and there are no deep tracks in the snow leading off the road … yet.

But there’s a price, too, for running out front. You’ll be the first to find the one really slippery corner, or the blown-down tree, or the nodding control crew. It’s like being point man on patrol. On balance, giving #1 to last year’s winners is probably a handicapping method, sort of like the NBA’s allocating the worst draft positions to the best performing teams. More evidence: The rallymaster calls it “The Curse Of Car #1″.

Well, then, who won Totem 2008? Glenn Wallace & R. Dale Kraushaar did. In winning last year, those two zeroed the entire second day. If ever a handicap was called for…

But we got to the Bear’s Claw, and #1 was not on their car; instead, they were carrying #2. Whaaa? Those guys are veterans, they know the drill — how’d they miss the duty?

Pffft. Veterans? I’ll give you veterans. The team in the lead car included a man who first ran Totem in 1959. APPARENTLY, if you show up with a pedigree like that, they just bow and hand you the #1. This time, the award of first position is all about honor.

Near the other end of the train, running #20, a novice team’s in a 4×4 pickup with 31″ tires. They’ve strapped down some big chunks of wood in the back… is that for weight? Or is there a bonfire later? I feel a mild sense of dread on their behalf, but I can’t think of a way to warn them without sounding like a jerk or a fuddy-duddy. As Glenn Wallace put it, ‘Nobody likes the “you’re doomed” speech.’ Same goes for the very pretty Golf, with its supercharger and roll cage; the car doesn’t seem quite right for where we’re headed.

And finally, there’s a leviathan of steel, a sled so wide and so long and so heavy that calculations of its polar momentum outstrip our calculator’s registers: it’s the Rally de Ville.

It wasn't done yet.

Snow

We went through Tech in the midst of snow flurries, a delightful hint of what was to come. Snow’s what we hope for; snow’s what makes Winter rallies such a draw. And Totem did not disappoint: we had light coatings that looked like drizzled icing on a Bundt cake; we had 6 or 8 centimeters of slightly moist snow in granules, like beach sand; we had, early Sunday morning, some churned up brown slush. There was snow, snow, snow, gravel, and snow. Reliable wit Eric Horst opined, “The snowiest Thunderbird I ever saw was a Totem in 2009.”

What we didn’t have a lot of was ice — and no one was complaining. You might remember that the final section on Sunday last year was mostly ice and mostly hilly. Some 2-wheel-drive cars didn’t make it over, and some AWD cars struggled to. This year, there were lots of new-looking studded snow tires scratching their way around Cache Creek before the start.

Winter Scoring

To balance out the snow and ice, the B.C. winter rallies grant three flavors of time relief.

The first is a one-second-each-way grace period around perfect time. If your team crosses the timing mark up to a second before, or up to a second after, the time the rallymaster’s calculated, you get a zero.

The second type of relief expands the grace period after you’ve taken points. If churned up brown slush forces you to slow below CAST, and you’re, say, 20 seconds late into Control #1, you’ll take 19 points there — but if thereafter you’re able to hold the CAST, you’ll still be 20 seconds late into Control #2. It would be uncivil to give you another 19 points for the same shortcoming, so the grace period expands, for you alone, to encompass the amount you were late at the previous control. So your second 20 seconds late is accorded zero points. You can nibble away at your lateness up ’til the end of the section, and so long as you get closer to zero seconds off, you’ll not take any more points.

The final variety of relief is a garden-variety time declaration. Time decs were only recently adopted, and there’s still a certain distaste for them. Long time competitors disparage their use, preferring to just run late and take the points they take.

A time dec “should” only be claimed for delays out of one’s control… but that meaning is obviously fluid. We found a 400 pound Angus heifer standing sideways in the center of the road; it took us ten or more seconds to slow, avoid, and creep around her. Is that delay time-dec worthy? Normally we’d just hump it up above CAST and catch up — but this was on the slush, and I’d been near to my limit just to reach CAST. Faster wasn’t an option. Perhaps if the scores were, on average, larger, the hyper-competitive folks would be more willing to take the points — but ten points is about five places in Unlimited.

Saturday night scoring came together quickly (more about that in a bit), and Paul circulated the provisional scores. With his charming oscillating timbre, Paul the rallymaster always sounds slightly surprised. He had this comment:

“I’m going to be pressed to abandon Winter scoring.”

“Why?”

“We have multiple teams with one point.”

So we knew it was going to be tight. In Unlimited, it was 1-1-3-4-5 on Saturday night.

And, of course, Offs

Sad to say, the 4×4 truck didn’t make it to noon on Saturday. They slid off with enough forward vector to deploy the airbags, and the shaken co-driver wisely called a halt. The race-ready Golf wasn’t winter-rally-ready, and rolled early on. So far no serious injuries, and I trust it won’t spoil it for you if I say there were no serious injuries over the weekend. There were, though, plenty more excursions into the B.C. scenery. I think Sweep did six extractions the first day, from a field of 21 cars.

Saturday ran late into the evening. I guess it usually does, but I recall feeling surprise when I glanced at the Timewise clock just after the midpoint break, and it read 5:30:00. It was fully dark, and there were four sections left to run. Just before the start of the last section, barely outside Williams Lake, the snow was falling in earnest.

The route took a loop off the Frasier Road, and two control crews were heading in to their worker locations from the backside, running counter-course. After a long straight stretch, there was a flat-to-off-camber 90 right on the edge of a ravine, and the sticking snow at the outer edge lay atop withered grass. The leading car braked, set up, turned, and drifted just a skance wide — too much! Despite AWD and snow tires and a thorough driver warm-up on like conditions, there was not enough room to save it. They went forward, off the edge.

The folks in the trailing car, if they did not actually see it, caught on very quickly, and were immediately on the radio.

DIGRESSION: If you do not hold a HAM license, stop reading this and go begin studying for the Technician level exam. You may pick this up again later.

The first radio report gave chills to everyone listening. The car was invisible, out of sight somewhere down in the trees. No one else was nearby. Cars #0 — #6 were already on course, but some 30km from the location. There was no cell coverage. The organizers quickly dispatched one of the workers towards town… and then there was a collective sigh, like a half a hurricane, as the workers in the leading car (who’d gone down the ravine) came on the radio sounding practically conversational.

We continued, on route, on time, following the rallymaster’s lead, along the quickest path to the spot. The hillside was steep, slippery, and unclimbable. Rescuers made up a lifeline of towstraps, and tossed one end down. We arrived just as the workers were pulled over the top. They and their bags were quickly bundled away to the hotel, seemingly no worse for wear. The car was left to slumber in the deepening snow, and (not to foreshadow too much) so too slept an overlooked control log.

The Twist

We went on on Sunday, while Ron stuck around Williams Lake to get the car. After the slushy first section, there was a lengthy regularity along Spring Lake that was simply marvelous, in deep, tacky snow, and lacking the usual underlayment of ice. Two more sections took us to the end. As usual, Sunday’s scores were better than Saturday’s. Back in Cache Creek, it appeared that both the front-runners had taken a single point on Sunday, and it looked like breaking a 2-2 tie would be necessary.

But the control log that’d been lurking in the ravine was retrieved with the car, and delivered to the rallymaster. That score sheet dealt a critical blow to one of the leading teams. With those latent scores included, the second place team had half again as many points as the winners!

That is, they had 3 points total, and the winners had 2.

Epilogue

I sense the day is near when a team will zero both days of a B.C. Winter Rally, and perhaps as close is the day when we’ll need to break a tie at that score. It could happen next February, at The Thunderbird. I strongly recommend that you go to The Thunderbird, and when you do, bring your two-meter radio. You never know when you’ll need it.