92CelicaHalfTrac wrote:
Uh oh what happened? 
(Well, besides the obvious)
Any idea why it wasn't making more power?
What he said (NGTD)
NGTD wrote:
Those that have and those that will (roll that is). It looks like you got an express ticket to join the first group.
Like I tell everybody, I don't do anything half-assed and "go big or go home!", so I went home 
Now Ima share a little story with everyone...
Tons of downtime after Cochrane, due to:
1) The car making it through the event unscathed
2) Me being poor and eating ramen noodles/doing nothing for two months while I pinched pennies for Rocky's national entry fee, 5 new Dmacks, and a tune for the car. (don't ask me how I spent $2500 on rallying in 2 months, that's like 4 weeks of net pay, and then two hotel rooms night, $200 for the test day this Sunday... it hurts to think about it). Remember kids, NEVER keep track of racing expenses. Doubly if you have a family!
And then the Dmacks, lovely, lovely Dmacks. Chris Martin at oldschoolmotorsports.ca worked with me so shipping wouldn't kill me too badly, worked out well in the end. The price we are getting charged out West is stupid for Yoko's... and if I have to call for pricing, I'm fairly certain that means you want to charge me too much. Plus the contingency that Dmack offers is great! More on these later on in the writeup.
Another small thing that was taken care of was the co-driver's side front camber issue... instead of positive camber with the suspension settled, I now have "maybe" -0.5*. Hopefully I can wear out the inside blocks a bit better than just the outside shoulder like on my winter tires. More on this as well later on in the writeup.
We also did some other misc. things like plug all of the open holes in the unibody so dust (or god forbid mud) can't come in. Updated our first aid kit so it 100% meets CARS regs... a little birdie may have warned me about those being checked more thoroughly @ Rocky...
Car has a small oil leak from the oil pan. Leaked about 500ml after 30 dyno pulls and 300+kms of driving, so I'm not really concerned. Going to keep a litre of oil in the car and probably add some stop-leak stuff just in case. Either way, it won't be getting fixed until after Mountain Trials!
So, I worked the past 2 months spending as little money as possible. Near the end of April, things started ramping up again as we had a test day the Sunday (May 20th) before Rocky (May 25th/26th).
And so it begins...
Test day arrives. Jeff and I are stoked, car is running awesome, have some newer (but still used) Porterfield R4 pads on the car. MOAR CAMBER = awesome. Unfortunately, the DMack's I had ordered were unable to be mounted by the shop who had done rally tires before. They got all skierd at 150psi and called it quits. Oh well, guess I'll run ginormous 205/65R15 Michelin softs that are 5 years old and at 50% tread.
Awesome thing about the test day is that you basically get unlimited runs. As such, I sold 3 runs as a fundraiser for Matt Johnston's rally documentary. It's not much, but including my own donation, I think I raised $600 which all went to Matt. I did my part! Amazingly enough, only 1 out of the 3 people showed up (ok, maybe not, kind of expected). Good thing this was the coolest of the bunch, a local forum regular that I typically argued politics with (damn tree-hugging-liberal-hippies I tell ya)! I had forgotten what he drives, but he showed up in a 2 year old Hummer H3 that he takes out at least 1 month into the woods. Cool offroad rig, and does he beat on it!
The best thing about this? He brought a gopro! Cool! Combining this with my iphone with an external mic hooked up, plus an additional camcorder mounted on the rollcage, we had a ton of footage with incar audio. How sweet is that? Haven't gotten around to making a full blown awesome video, but here are a couple videos:
MOAR BOOST = BETTER LAUNCH! Have to slip the clutch at 6k to get it to spool, but whatever:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IKuDKj6VYR8
Now, before you say anything, E36 M3ty driving is E36 M3TY. I was trying to explain everything going on to Nick while driving, and I wanted to give him a show. The ride after was much quicker just with me shutting up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EgN8Nx6QaPs
And finally, a general compilation that Nick made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1yokeL-mR0Q
Test day successful! Was about 4 seconds off the pace of Hardy. Monsieur Richard considers brand new soft gravels to be worth 1sec/km, stage was 4km long... I'm just sayin' that, I'm just sayin' ;)
So, recce for Rocky is Thursday, race Friday/Saturday. I had Thurs/Fri off, but ended up taking Wednesday off as it's a 4+ hour drive to Kananaskis. Good thing I did!
Monday was a stat holiday in Alberta, so I took that time to get the car all happy. Washed it, checked it over. Took Jeff's wife for a spin in the car. This was after Jeff fixed an intermittent start issue with the car that was caused by the cluster that is the battery terminals on this car. They were corroded quite bad, Jeff cleaned 'em up with baking soda, BOOM, car starts everytime. Thanks bud, you da bes!
Getting ready to shut it down @ around 9, Jeff and I take the car for a final spin to get fuel. We come over a crest in the road equivalent to a L5 at a "higher" rate of speed (80km/h) and I get a bad vibration in the wheel. It doesn't happen again no matter how hard I try to get the car to do it, so we fuel up and park the car.
Tuesday night rolls around and I decide to get all brilliant and add another camber bolt to the driver's side of the car to get some more camber (currently sitting at 0*). Get that all done relatively easy. Have an alignment scheduled at Sherwood Honda ($69.99 alignment with custom specs, almost half price compared to anywhere else in Alberta). Since I'm getting an alignment done, I decide to try and get some more camber out of the passenger side of the car. And the E36 M3 hits the fan.
It's 11pm now, pull the wheel off, and I find the upper DMS camber bolt has broken. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. The problem with this is that with rally suspension being longer than the stock stuff, the strut is under preload even at full droop and the spring perch completely lowered. Since the bolt is eccentric, there is no way for me to get the cam lobe portion of it past the ears of the strut. I fight with it for a good hour, until I decide to undo the upper strut mount from the chassis. Unfortunately, the front sway bar on the talon is contacting the cv axle at full droop like that. So, I jack up the other side of the car, hoping to allow the swaybar to fall a bit more. And fall it does! The inner cv joint pulled apart. Now, everytime I've had this happen, simply pushing the cv joint back together seems to have fixed it. Not this time! I get the bolt out with ease, and get everything assembled back together (including cv) by 2pm (had to still swap to winter tires/rims so the alignment can be done and pull the skid plate). I sleep on Jeff's couch for 4 hours until I drive to get the alignment done. Theresa came out at 5am (Jeff was working in Whitecourt) and freaked out to see me there LOL!
So, leave to get the alignment. Decide to stop at NAPA at 8am and install a new camber bolt in the parking lot. Have I mentioned it was 25C on Sunday, and proceeded to PISS rain for the past 3 days and be around 5C? Everything and myself had been soaked in water for the past 24 hours. Beyond that (this is the important part) the car has a BAD vibration. I triple checked everything and the camber adjustments hadn't thrown off the alignment too bad, I had to assume the worse that it was a cv axle.
Get the camber bolt, drop the car off. I ask the tech to install the camber bolt for me, he obliges. Yes, things are going my way!
Get the car back to Jeff's at noon, start loading. Take the car for a quick spin with gravels on (in case it is a bent mazda MPV rim), which makes the vibration slightly less? Decide to leave everything alone for now. Get packed, get out of Edmonton by 2pm.
We also had to stop at Subaru Calgary for registration, sell some rims, bullE36 M3 with everyone, and then drive 30 minutes in the WRONG direction out of Calgary to pick up my rims and DMacks which Azam Deen of CAMS mounted for me. If you ever need work done on a rally car in Calgary, Azam is actually reasonable to deal with.
Thursday rolls around. What can I say about recce? It went well. I do some killer notes IMO, but I also have more experience at it than 85% of rallyists in North America (30+ recce events). Jeff was starting to get pretty comfortable writing them down and reading them back to me on the 2nd pass. Rocky recce was timed so we even were able to go to a Vietnamese restaurant and sit down for lunch for an hour! One thing we noted is that everything I was calling seemed to be 6's... that's not a good sign, considering I 130'd Hunter Valley at Cochrane... on street snows... on ice and packed snow... in a car with significantly less top end.
Oh yea, it's still raining. Everything is muddy, but the key is that Rocky roads are (mostly) a kind of shale base which sheds water. It's not going to be nearly as muddy as people think it will be IMO. 195 wide DMack softs? Exccceellllleeennnnt.
Recce ends, and I take the car for a 160km/h blast to shake out the vibration. Oh yes, it is real, and oh yea, it most definitely is the CV. Good thing I packed a spare and all of the tools required to change it. I had called my father (greatest person in the world) at 2 in the afternoon in between recce sections and asked him if he could come up from Red Deer to help us change it in the parking lot. He made it there by 7:30 (worked until 5), thanks Dad! With his help, any issues we ran into would be taken care of. We get everything disassembled, but have to get to the driver's meeting/novice meeting. By the time those are done (an hour) my Dad has everything back together, just wants us to go over everything and make sure it's ok. Amazing. Put the DMacks on, button the rest of the car up, then go drink/eat.
Friday morning arrives, everything is going good. Leave Stony on time, get to Calgary early for the downtown start. While at the organization area where the first time control is (we got there about 30 minutes early for good measure) Hardy points out to me I am an idiot and put our DMacks on backwards. Thanks to him (and his crewman Jerry), we swapped them around as they had trailered the car in and had a nice jack and torque wrench. Cool.
Get downtown, bullE36 M3, chat, have pictures taken, feeling pretty good. Head out to the first stage (1hour 25 minute transit).
I've noticed Jeff has not been Jeff all morning. It's really subtle, but I assume he is tired which is reasonable. It's been a E36 M3show.
1st stage is coming up. I'm pumped. I want to go FAST out of the gate. Unfortunately, this section of stage is muddier than the other section. Everyone in front of me is running yoko muds I believe. To warm up, we run 8km north on Powderface, then another 24km further to the end, service, then go the whole 34km south and then back north. WOW :eyepop:
Boom, out of the gate. Good lord is the car slow! Elevation boourns. Beyond that, the car feels different. I attribute this to us raising the car 3/4" in the front the previous evening, but beyond that, the DMack's are much "different" than the Pirellis and Michelins I had originally ran on. The DMack's felt like I was driving on wheels made of solid rubber (yes, running 26psi cold). A bit unnerving but I warmed up to them. As a bit of a tangent, the reason for this (I believe), is they simply have more material to them. The 195/65R15 DMacks mounted on the compomotives weigh a good couple pounds more than either my 205 Pirellis or Michelins. Now, both of those sets were at 50% tread, so maybe that was the difference? Either way, solid tire IMO. Anywho, the pads also took a while coming up to temperature in the cold (about 4 corners) again, a bit unnerving. Whatever, like that's going to stop me! Start beating on the car. Feeling good, Jeff's pace on the notes is a bit funny though (I later learn Friday evening he had a headache all day :( ). I'm calling a lot of nexts. Either way, I'm still hauling ass, no two ways about it. Jeff called this care, muddy. The car kicked this way in a straight line at about 120km/h:
Traveled like that for about 100+ feet and then into a L5.
We get near the end of the stage and I see Wim Van der Poel in his Evo 8 ahead of us. The way the road is, you can actually see close to a km of the road (minus some hidden by crests) to the finish. I'm confident we won't actually come in contact with him if I continue at my flatout pace. The notes read approximately as follows:
smCR 75 bigCR into R5 into L4> 50/finish
After we came over the small crest, not only was wim only on the other side of the big crest, but I noticed a significant surface change from wet shale to a goopy mud on the big cr. Get on the brakes realllllllll good, get er' slowed down (pretty light over the crest though!) and set up the car over the corner. Unfortunately, there is a rock that is about 1' tall by 8" wide in my line! And the road narrows a bit with a gnarly ditch on the outside. I manage to get the car to clip the rock with the corner of the front bumper, pushing wide while just missing the timing equipment. Quite the way to end the stage!
Start checking times; 6th overall nationally, booya! Sure, we dropped 14 seconds to Hardy/Max, but they are still running twice the power and muds. I like the pace we are running, and hope to maintain it.
Now, we caught Wim (1 minute in 8kms). There was another Talon in front of him that we determined we would also catch about 15kms into the 24km stage coming up, so they both were kind enough to let us go. In the rush, Jeff and I didn't do our normal first 500-ish meter run through the notes. Really wish we would have...
The start of the new stage wasn't marked during recce, the FINISH of the 8km stage was. Our notes were off by a couple hundred meters. As soon as the first notes left Jeff's mouth, I knew something was wrong. Unfortunately, I do have much to teach Jeff and I am a bad teacher. I started calling notes to him of what we were hitting. I hadn't explained to him he should look for combinations of corners, not single notes, and to remain calm while doing so. So I called notes and he looked for singular notes. After about 5kms of stage (I was moving) I knew a big mother of all dips (200 foot elevation change and then back in 400 meters) and yelled at him it's the dip. Boom! Back on the notes.
Once again, we are flying. Like, there is simply no way I can expect Jeff to keep up and I don't. But we are moving, even with terrible driving and notes being off.
With 11km's left, Jeff yells at me !R4>3 puddle inside. I know this corner pretty well, and back off because the puddle is deep and will pop us to the outside of the corner.
A couple things we missed; there is actually a crest here, which at my pace causes the car to get light. I also suck at driving apparently.
Hit the puddle, set the car up, no big deal. The car steps out more than I like, so I reel it in a bit and then continue around the corner. The car steps out a bit too much again, but with the prior correction, this sends us wider over the smcr. If I would have dropped the car into 2nd and steered into the slide (rather than countersteering) we may have made it, or spun in the road. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
Hung the driver's end off the edge of the 25 foot droop for ~75 feet, then it caught in the soft edge of the road and barrel rolled us perpendicular to it two times, with a nice bounce into a pirouette of the cliff. We had slowed to no speed at all by the time we went off, plus the trees slowed us.
And that was that. Talon doors are scary on your side (you can't open them) and Jeff had to kick out the front windshield. We had a nice view of the underside of the car, it actually looked pretty good! Body was pretty fubar'd though.
Went back to the hotel, cleaned up, helped out our brother from another mother from Saskachabush (Noel McAvena) who had Angela Cosner co-driving for him in his Neon for the rest of the day. Then we drank.
Recovered the car Saturday afternoon. Once again, my father drove up from Red Deer after purchasing a winch (just in case). We already had all of the other important recovery tools. With two half ton trucks and two tow ropes, we were able to recover the car no problem. A Dmack had debeaded but was otherwise fine, so we threw the spare on. Went and got the trailer, drove the car onto it. Got back to the hotel, went to the awards ceremony, drank, went back to the hotel, drank a lot more, and when the bar closed went to the camper that had the fridge of unlimited Kokanee. Life was good.
Woke up the next morning, got everything packed, and headed back to Edmonton.
Fin.
And if you read this far, I sealed the deal on another car today. May be at Mountain Trials 
Michelin's like around ~28psi hot to work their magic, really helped the car with grip after that.
