I know there were some GRM folks there, so if you were, feel free to post up thoughts, photos, etc here! Below is my quick recap with some photos...
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Ok, let's see if I can get through a New England Forest Rally recap.....quite a bit to say and show.
Before I get started, here's a recap of the miles we spent in vehicles:
- 1,498 miles in the Sequoia towing
- 300 miles (approx) in Dan Downey's WRX for recce
- 250+ miles in the rally car doing transits
- 100 (?) stage miles in the rally car
- 2.5 miles being towed by Heavy Sweep
- 5 miles being towed by a van towing another car on a trailer
- 1 mile being pushed by above van
- 100 miles (approx) riding among the cargo in a v10 service van with no seats
= over 2,250 miles total over five days!
So yeah, my 22 mile commute tomorrow isn't gonna seem too long :)
Anyhow, here's the recap:
We left from DC area wednesday for a 13+ hour tow up to Team O'Neil Rally School to meet up with Dan Downey and pick up his WRX for recce. Also got a quick high-speed tour of the facility in one of the rally Fiestas they use there, which was fun.
Met up at our air bnb house a few miles from Rally HQ. we shared a house with Downey/Brolin in the e30 and Pullen/Erin Kelly in their Impreza (incidentally, they did an engine swap during the 2nd day of the rally in under an hour!!)
Good times were had...
Thursday was recce day...about 9 hours of long-haul driving in street cars and doing the stages at slow speeds to check notes, etc.
On to Day 1 one of the rally. We got nice placement at Parc Expose, right next to Ken Block's awesome Cosworth Escort RS
if you followed this rally at all (or car sites in general), you would have seen got in a wreck on SS3 and burned to the ground, sadly.
Downey/Brolin and us
Other teams look more professional (because they are)
Meanwhile, Josh S. was loading up the crew rig for service
I don't have any action pics yet, since I obviously couldn't take any, but here are a handful of my favorite pics from the stages (mostly on transits and before starts)
Day 1 went fine, though the 4th stage was cancelled due to Block's car setting the woods on fire, so we did a super-long transit on some back-roads back to service. Day 1 is the faster stages and with my car being slow and me not being very aggressive, we were pretty slow. Is what it is, but I'm still not very confident on fast stages with a lot of 5s and 6s. On the very first stage I overcooked the Right-4-minus at the spectator area, lost grip, and slid out into the shrubberies, having to back up and get going again. No damage, but definitely got me even more tentative.
Day 2, a much longer day, started at the crack of dawn...
Hooper's Lexus is so awesome..
I thought we picked up the pace a little, but were still only mid-pack on our class and slower than I'd like to be. Somewhere I went too wide through a hard left-hander and as I tried to accelerate hard with the car sideways, we went into the outside shrubberies and hit something hard. very hard. I thought it had hit the rear wheel, but as it turns out it hit the side of the car right behind Jim's seat area. We kept going, more on that later......
At the beginning of SS8 we were sitting a few seconds back of 5th place in class (IIRC) and I saw one of the class front-runner's cars broken (we would join them later). With a shot at the podium, maybe I pushed a bit harder in the super-rough and rocky stage, which we were running for a second time and it was even more torn up by the front-running cars. Hard rock hits everywhere, and for some dumb reason I didn't exactly slow down to the car's capabilities. About 3/4 of the way through, we came around a turn and plunged downward into a compression with a big rock in it. BANG! The hardest hit I can remember on the skidplate ever. I immediately thought of my oil pan, hoping the beefy 3/16" stainless skid and support bar took the impact. A turn later I was about to say to Jim "check the oil pressure gauge" since I couldn't see it while watching the rapid turns and roughness, and then the oil pres light comes on. Damn. Go aroudn the turn, see an open area on the left, and shut the car off and coasted to a stop.
Got out to put our triangles up the course so nobody would hit us, and there is a trail of oil coming from the turn all the way to where the car is, and a puddle under the engine. We're done.
Also noticed that our muffler had been ripped from the rest of the exhaust and some other big dents on the sides of the rockers/doors that weren't there before......
After waiting for the remaining cars to pass by, the Sweep team showed up and we got a tow over two more miles of rocky stage to the end
He dropped us at the end of the stage, while the other sweep truck was dropping Jesse Witsell's VW.
We were left there to await our crews (almost 50 miles away at service) to bring trailers....
Some local campers stopped by to provide beer and talk rally..
Eventually, Downey's van and trailer showed up to get Jesse (with someone "on the way" to get us since our trailer was at the house 100+ miles away)
But, since rally is rally, they tried to use the van to push us the 6ish miles to the main road to make it easier to find us.
Did that for a mile, but Dave was worried about airbag going off, so we hooked our car to the back of the trailer. Keep in mind the Van has no seats, so Jesse and his codriver were riding IN their car on the trailer, while we were being towed behind...
So we got to the main road, and eventually a guy we had never met, in a big white van, showed up to pick us up. Again, the van had only one passenger seat, so I got to ride for 100 miles or so on twisty/rough roads at high speeds back on some tarps and blankets piled on toolchests and tires and a Subaru bumper. This must be how they do it in 3rd world countries!
So, that's how our rally ended. We didn't get back to rally HQ until after the awards/party were pretty much over....
All in all, it was a good time, and disappointing to not finish (and to be so slow before that). We'd like to do it again sometime, but maybe when the car is built a bit more extensively and my driving is ...uh... not so sucky. The towing distance is pretty substantial too.....and at 10mpg towing, gas aint' cheap.
Left in the morning and towed 13 hours home....dropped Jim at the Rage Cage garage, and headed home to sleep....
Anyhow, thanks to our crew chief Josh Sennett (other crew couldn't make it) and the guys from other crews who helped us out (and whose names I forget some of), including the white van guy, an old-time rallyist named Dave. If you read this, you know who you are!!
I'll do a more detailed fix-up post later, but a few pics of damage....
