Tall Pines Wrap-Up

I'm back from what in my mind was a successful Rally of the Tall Pines: we finished the rally without major problems, and Luis got his 3rd place in Production 2 class in the Ontario Performance Rally Championship.

The weather forecast was all over the map leading up to the rally. In the end, the weather on the day of the rally was clear, with a fairly thick layer of snow from a few days before. The stages ended up being a combination of loose snow and powder early in the day, which compacted to almost ice as the day went on. This made tire choice difficult, and we were forced to compromise based on the tires available, but Luis did his best to cope with the poor grip we experienced at some points.

We were really running to finish, so caution was the order of the day. We passed plenty of cars that pushed a bit too hard and went off the road. When the Tall Pines TV broadcast airs in late December, watch for Car 41, the yellow Rabbit of Malo/Fudalej. They went off near the end of the spectator area on stage A5, the third run through the Iron Bridge spectator stage, and judging by the aftermath, it must have been pretty spectacular when it happened.

We were only entered in the regional portion of the rally, so we had a 2-or-so-hour gap in the middle of the day while the national-only stages were being run. After that, we re-joined the rally for the final four stages, including two runs through the always amazing Castledine's Corner spectator area.

Every year, I'm floored by witnessing the sheer amount of work and manpower (and by imagining the work that I don't witness firsthand) that goes into pulling the Rally of the Tall Pines off. This year was the best year that I've personally experienced, not only because of the "proper" Tall Pines snow that's been absent the past few years, but because the workers and organizers consistently manage to do the unthinkable of out-doing their performance from the year before.

Jeff

Tall Pines is a-comin'

After a month away from rallying, it's time for the last event of the season: the Rally of the Tall Pines in Bancroft, Ontario.

Tall Pines is the last rally in both the Ontario and Canadian championships, and it's generally an amazing rally in its own right. Like most years, several titles are on the line and the weather is extremely iffy - right now I hear Bancroft has a snowfall warning, but the forecast for competition day is above freezing... barely - so it should be a good show for the fans.

I'm going to be riding once again with Luis Melo. He and I teamed up earlier this year at the Rallye Perce-Neige in February. This will be our first foray in the Ontario Performance Rally Championship since then, but with our strong second-place finish at Perce-Neige, we're still in the running for third in the Production 2 championship for the year.

We won't have internet access in Bancroft, so I won't be able to post an update here until after I get back. In the meantime, there are a few sources for realtime and semi-realtime news, results and photos. Look for Car 45:

flatovercrest - rally news and photos
Rally Scoring - live results and stage times

Jeff

Targa - Finished!

We're done! We finished the rally and qualified for our Targa Plate. We came second in class, third in category 7, and eighth in the Modern division.

Unfortunately, our teammates in Car 404, Bob and Adam Trinder, DNF'd on Thursday with engine issues.

I'll be scouring the web for photos and other items; watch here for links as I find them.


Jeff

After a long night and with the help of several other teams and local residents, Rob and our crew managed to get the rally car back in proper running order.

Today was a good, clean run, which helped to make up for yesterday. We held our class position and set zero times on a few stages.

Here's a look at the car now:

Jeff

Apologies for not posting anything until now. I've had troubles getting internet access since I arrived.

At this point on Tuesday evening, two of the five competitive legs have been completed, along with the unscored prologue on Sunday.

Sunday - Prologue

The Sunday stagest were fairly uneventful - the teams spent the day shaking out the bugs in the car and working on in-car communication. The highlight of the day for me was the meet & greet session at the Legion senior's home - the residents were amazingly friendly.

Monday - Leg 1

Leg 1 was a good day for us. We finished the leg in second place in our category, with only 15 seconds in penalties.

Our one incident (and penalty) happened on stage 2. We came into a right hand turn, but the brakes faded. We overshot the turn, spun 180 and banged both left wheels against the curb. There was only a scuff to one wheel, but some of the rear suspension was a bit bent. At service, our crew bled the brakes and that solved the braking issue.

Tuesday - Leg 2

Leg 2 also started out well - we zeroed one stage, and came close on both runs of the high-speed Leading Tickles stage.

Our luck changed on the last stage of the day, though, the in-town stage through the streets of Gander. We got too wide on a sharp right-hander and hit a tree on the outside of the corner. Both Rob and I are fine, but the left front corner of the car was pretty much wrecked. We managed to finish the stage (and under our Trophy Time!), but our crew has some major work tonight. As I write this, Rob and the guys have found the parts we need and are putting the car back together for tomorrow.

Closing Notes

I'm on a borrowed computer at the moment, so I don't have any way to get photos posted. until I can, check out the Targa coverage at flatovercrest. Also, the event tracker on the Targa web site doesn't seem to be working - have a look at the Rally Scoring web site for semi-real-time scores.

Jeff

Targa!

It's just a few days now until Targa Newfoundland. I'll be there co-driving for Rob Gritten, an accomplished road racer from Vancouver, in the Rocky Mountaineer Racing 1986 Toyota Corolla GTS.

Assuming that I can get onto the interwebs from the various hotels we're staying at, I'm planning to post news, photos and updates in the evenings. The action starts on Sunday, Sept. 9 with a non-scored "Prologue" day; the stuff that counts for points begins on Monday, Sept. 10 and goes until Friday, Sept. 14.

This rally isn't like most others. To begin with, it's all on tarmac - no gravel. Also, it has a wide variety of amazing vehicles... I believe the way they phrase it is "classics, or modern cars likely to become classics." On top of all that, it's HUGE: it's about the same mileage as an entire year of the Canadian Rally Championship, but compressed into one week.

So, check back here for pics and scuttlebutt from the rally. If you need a Targa fix between my updates, check the Event Tracker for near-real-time scores. We're in car 718.

Jeff

Bad Jeff!

I have to apologize - I've been neglecting my blog. I have results and photos from Baie des Chaleurs and the Galway Cavendish Forest Rally to post, but right now Targa Newfoundland is looming. More on those when I get back... in the meantime, Targa!

Jeff

Change of plans for Black Bear

Things didn't go according to plan for Black Bear. Luis couldn't make it and a couple of other rides fell through, so I ended up going as a marshal.

I did have a chance to take some photos for a change, though. Here's a sampling of what I shot of the start of the first stage:




More photos to come when I have a chance. Check back soon!



My upcoming schedule is up in the air. Drivers, if you need a navvie for Galway-Cavendish, New England Forest, Black River Stages or anything else, give me a shout.




Jeff

Mexico Photos

At long last, I've put together some links to action shots from Mexico. Enjoy!

SS 9
Super Special - Day 1
Super Special - Day 1 (warning: popups)
Super Special - Day 3 (warning: popups)

Takeoff...
...and landing

Finish Ceremony

Just a note: my next event will be the Black Bear Rally in Dorset, Ontario on June 16, with Luis Melo. Check the rally web site or my co-driving page for more info.

Jeff

Rally Mexico!

I didn't manage to get internet access while we were in Mexico, so I've been saving this up for almost a week:

Rally Mexico has been terrific; the fans here are astounding. I think I've had more photos taken of me this weekend than in my whole life before.

We finished 18th in Group N and 33rd overall.

Recce

We spent all day Tuesday and Wednesday doing recce. I found out quickly that things work... well... different in Mexico. For example, here "non-rally traffic" looks like this:

We took things easy and safely on the recce. One team didn't, though:

All in all, recce was a couple of long hard days. It almost took as much out of us as the actual rally.

Opening Ceremony

The Opening Ceremonies were amazing. We started off in the town of Silao, just down the road from the Rally Headquarters in Leon. The plan was to drive from there in convoy to the actual opening ceremonies in Leon... all the route book said about Silao was that it was a "holding area". As we turned the last corner before the holding area, we were met by a canyon of screaming fans. As it turned out, the holding area was a display of cars in the town square, and it seemed like every person in all the surrounding towns had come to see the cars and meet the crews. We spent our hour wait there autographing posters, notebooks, rally shirts and hats, and on occasion, babies.

From Silao, we left in a big convoy to Guanajuato. The town was beautiful... the opening ceremonies were in the heart of the old part of the city. It reminded me of Old Quebec City, but with a Spanish feel instead of a French one, and the narrow streets felt even narrower with people lined three and four deep as we snaked our way to the Guanajuato square for the official opening ceremony. Ceremonies, actually: they had three separate ceremonial starts so that they could fit all the people.

After the ceremonial start, we headed back onto the highway to Leon... and took our first damage of the rally.

I had seen an interesting practice being used in highway construction in Mexico: here, when a road or a highway lane is closed, the road owners and contractors make sure it stays closed by placing lines of large rocks across the road. As we were driving along the main highway back to Leon, we were following a truck. Suddenly, we saw a cabbage-sized rock in our path that the large truck had managed to drive over without touching. With a car on our left and a ditch on our right, Craig decided that the best course of action was to go straight and get the rock between our wheels. We felt a big "bang" as the car hit the rock, then the shudder as the car passed over it. Luckily, since we were in a rally car with a good skidplate, we got off reasonably unscathed: the only damage was to our rear bumper cover that the rock tore off as it left us, which our crew promptly reattached when we got back to the service area.

Leg 1 - Friday

Friday went well on the whole, but we had stalling problems a few times during the day... the combination of high temperature and thin air did not make the rally car's motor happy. A late call from me on stage 2 meant we missed a hairpin turn... as Craig tried to turn the car around to get pointed back in the right direction, the car stalled... and wouldn't restart. Luckily, there was a tow truck at the corner, and we got pulled back out of the way. After the engine cooled a bit, Craig managed to get it fired again, and we were back on our way.

The super special stage on Friday night gave us problems as well. The previous cars had made the tarmac sections of the course slippery, wet and muddy, and on our first time through one sharp right corner, the car slid off and stalled. Again, it took several minutes to get the car cooled off and fired up; we lost a few minutes, but we were able to continue.

Leg 2 - Saturday

Saturday went without much trouble. Our only "moment" of the day was when we slid into the ditch and stopped against a cliff face. Craig managed to power out of the ditch and we were back on our way, with only a bit of cosmetic damage on the driver's side of the car.
We were happy with our run that day, but when we got back we got disappointing news: our teammates had been excluded over a procedural mix-up.

Leg 3 - Sunday

Sunday was the short day, but as I told Craig, it was "shorter", not "easier" than the other days.
On stage 17, we went a bit wide on another turn and put two wheels into the ditch. After the stage, we checked the car out and saw that a good amount of dirt and gravel had been pushed into the tire bead. Unfortunately, because of our stalling problems on the transit, we lost time and didn't have time to change the tire before the next stage. Luckily, it held air all the way through stage 18, but we decided to not push our luck and replaced it on the next transit.

Stage 19, the last "real" stage of the rally, was another interesting one. As we came up the steep incline leading to the start control, the car stalled. We opened the hood to pour water over the intake manifold and the intercooler to cool the air that had been heating up in the engine bay... as we tried to get the engine started, our time came up. I ran up with the timecard and waved Craig into the control zone. Unfortunately, I was one second late. I jumped in the car, belted in and got ready for the stage.

What I didn't realize at the time was that it was a fan who had closed the hood, but he hadn't fastened the hood pins. About halfway through the stage as we landed from a big jump, the lip of the hood caught the air and the whole thing flipped up. Thankfully, the windshield was okay, but we pulled off to get the hood resecured and zipped off again. All in all, we probably lost about a minute.

The last stage of the day was the Super Special again, but unlike the previous runs, we did two laps continuously. On our first lap, we landed on our nose on a jump and bent the car slightly... but the car kept going and we finished the stage in respectable time and well ahead of the two-wheel-drive Peugeot 206 that we had been paired up with.

Looking Back

All in all, the rally was an amazing experience. The roads were spectacular, even if the constant turns were tiring for Craig... but the best part was the fans. Its removal from the schedule for 2008 (to be replaced by Rally Australia) means that its future is slightly uncertain, but even without Rally Mexico being a WRC round, it's definitely an event for any rally fan to experience.

Wow. Just... wow.

Jeff

Perce- Neige Photos

Photos have started trickling in from Rallye Perce-Neige.

Here's a nice set of photos of our incident on Farley II by Philippe Jodoin:

Here are a few other photos:

Action shot - Day

Action shot - Night

Jeff

Perce Neige!

I just got back from Maniwaki. Perce-Neige was terrific. Cold, but terrific.

My driver Luis had a fair bit of experience in rallysprints, but since this was his first full rally, we took it easy to start out. Even so, we started to slowly move up the running order, especially thanks to the slippery roads that put several of our competitors in the ditch.

Our one "gotcha"

Luis drove a clean rally. The only "moment" we had was on SS 6, the second run through the Farley stage. As we came into a Left 3, the car slid a bit to the right... Luis corrected, but the road turned to sheer ice. The car spun around, and we ended up nose-first in the ditch with our back wheels sticking out onto the road.

Luckily, we did all this in front of a spectator area (and luckily or unluckily, in front of one of the TV cameras). Even as we were coming to rest, there was a pack of spectators running over to our car. About five of them tried to give the car a quick push, but they couldn't move it. Finally after a few seconds of this, I hopped out and grabbed the triangles, and another bunch of spectators ran over. With about ten of us pushing, we finally got the car back on the road. A fan threw me the triangles, we jumped back in and took off. All in all, we lost about 3 or 4 minutes.

I saw a few folks with video cameras there, so if I find any YouTube video of what happened, I'll post a link.

Lighting Gremlins

We had problems with the auxiliary lights all weekend. On Friday night during our checks and scrutineering they were only working intermittently. We thought we'd found the problem and fixed it, but finally on Saturday when it really mattered, they didn't work at all.

This meant that on the night stages, we only had our standard headlights. We had to slow right down and lost a lot of time.

Still, all in all, we were happy with our performance, especially considering our lighting problems and the fact that it was Luis' first rally (and first time racing on snow). It seemed like Andrew Comrie-Picard was happy to see his old car rallying again; he and his co-host for the CRC TV broadcasts Jen Horsey took a fair bit of time out to do a spot on the car and an interview with Luis. I'm hopeful that at least some of it will make it into the final program.

Thanks

As always, I'm amazed to see the sheer number of dedicated people who come out to spend all day in the woods to let us race, and the organizers who commit huge numbers of unpaid hours to make rallies happen. While we were driving through the snow and cold at Perce-Neige, I was reminded how much all the volunteers and fans love the sport.

Our service crew was terrific, too. Paul and Luis' son Josh had never serviced at a rally before, but they pulled it off perfectly.

Photos, video and more to come!

The photographers and spectators are still trickling back to their homes, so photos should start appearing online within a few days. In the meantime, you can see a photo of us in this story on flatovercrest.com - look down the page for Car 44 - the little white Lada.

TV coverage is coming later this year. I'll post news on air dates and times when it's available.

Jeff

Almost Time for Maniwaki

I'm busy getting ready for Rallye Perce Neige Maniwaki. It looks like it's going to be a good rally.


There are 44 entries according to the most recent update on the event web site. A notable late entry is Travis Pastrana, in what I believe is his first Canadian rally.

The starting order has been published. Apparently, we'll be starting as the very last car on the road. The sheer ice we'll have to deal with (from 43 other cars polishing the road ahead of us) will keep our speed down, but this may be a bit of an equalizer for us against the other regional-only cars at the back of the pack: the power difference between the stock-engined Lada and the higher HP, modded cars won't matter so much if they can't get their extra power down either.

All in all, it looks like a great event. I haven't been to Perce Neige in three years, and I'm looking forward to going back.

Note: I don't know what the Internet situation's going to be like at our Maniwaki hotel. I may be able to post over the weekend, but maybe not. There are a few places you can get your fix of news from Perce Neige while I'm away:

www.rallyeperceneige.com - Event Web Site
www.rallyscoring.com - Live Stage Scores
www.flatovercrest.com - News Articles, Updates and Photos


Jeff

New Blog!

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog. This is something new I'm trying for 2007.

I've been running my web site for a while now and I've been looking for a way to post news and information from the road. I'll be trying out this to fill that need; if everything works well, you should get news from the rally as soon as I get to a computer instead of waiting until I get back home.

Last Season

The results are in from last season. Despite switching classes mid-season, we still managed to get enough points to take 2nd in the ESRC Group N championship.

Congratulations to my teammates Brian Street and his co-driver Rob Amato. Brian took first place in two USRC classes: Group N and Super Stock, and Rob won the USRC Group N co-driver title.

Schedule Updates

My 2007 season schedule isn't completely finalized yet, but there are a few events coming up that I know I'll be doing:

Rallye Perce Neige Maniwaki
Feb. 3, Maniwaki, QC, Canada

This is the first rally in the 2007 Canadian Rally Championship, and I'll be co-driving for Luis Melo in his P2 Lada Samara.

Corona Rally Mexico
Mar. 9-11, Leon, Gto., Mexico

This will be my first rally of the year with my regular driver, Craig Studnicky. We'll be competing in the ISG Rally Team Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI in Group N against the regular PWRC teams.

As I write, the car is being prepped at the European Rally School, and I've been learning Spanish at the Academy of Language and Culture to get ready for the rally.

Watch for my full schedule when its finalized on my web site.

Jeff