So, this weekend is the Rallye Perce Neige, opening round of the Canadian Rally Championship in Quebec. I was not planning on attending until I received a call last week from my former fulltime driver, to come out and play. Plans were hastily made, licences were quickly renewed, everything seemed to be going well. Hell, I went and hung out for a couple of hours Tuesday night at a friend's in Cochrane drinking beer and talking rally. Life was good.
Our rig of choice for crossing Canada (3500kms from Cochrane to Maniwaki, QC)? A 3/4 ton quad cab duramax 4x4 with an 18 foot car hauler. Total rig weight was around 20,000 pounds.
We get out of dodge at the time we wanted (6:45am Wednesday morning) and start heading east. We stop in Langden to pick up our service crew/team manager. It is now 7:45am, still doing well.
We hit the dusty trail, the transcanada highway, and start making record time. The cops don't care if you do 20 over, so we averaged almost 130km/h from Langden to Brandon, Manitoba with only one stop for Tim Hortons about an hour into the driver.
Brandon is 1100kms away from Calgary, and we make it there in 9 hours, which puts us at 6:00pm (one hour time zone change a hour ahead). As we pass through, the town, my driver says he wants to make a pit stop (I'm driving). I ask if he wants to stop at a fast food joint and he says no, just pull off onto the shoulder at the outskirts of town.
So we stop, everyone piles out. The crew chief and I start checking the hubs/tires on the trailer to see if there are any issues, when all of a sudden my driver yells at us there is a problem.
- "What is it?"
- "The wheel is gone:
- "What do you mean the wheel is gone?!"
- "I mean, the wheel and hub is not here!"
We had lost a wheel (by our estimates) over 200kms back 
I did not even notice, not a care in the world, the rig was hauling along just fine! Since We had 3/4 wheels, the one side of the axle wasn't scraping the ground so there were no sparks! The nut on the spindle was there but broken, which led us to believe this might have been more of a defect issue than heat (we were checking the hubs every 500kms). Of course, we had the poor 18' trailer which was only rated for 7k pounds (two 3500 pound axles) loaded down with 15 rims and tires, a 3500 pound race car, and a huge 8 bin tool box on the front full of tools. Definitely at the limits of the trailer (which by itself weighed close to 2000 pounds). We had the max weight we could put on the tongue though (close to 1500#'s iirc).
So, we're screwed right? Not yet. My first instinct is to find a rental trailer. We can take our time getting back from the race, but getting there on time is critical. Unfortunately, it's 6:00pm in the middle of nowhere, and BOTH uhauls in town closed at 5. We are faced with three choices:
- Travel 200 more kms as we currently stand to Winnipeg
- Try and locate an axle (princess auto, our equivalent of your harbour freight, sells universal trailer axles which should do the trick) and install it ourselves on the side of the highway
- Unload the open class STi rally car, and drive it and the rig to Winnipeg with the intent of getting a rental trailer as early as possible and getting the trailer fixed while we are in Quebec, to be picked up on our way back.
I was all for option 1. We could tone down the speed a bit, but the other hubs were all fine, same with the tires. My driver wasn't so keen, he wanted to swap the axle. Our crew chief said he could do it in an hour, and I pointed out to him that everything that could go wrong WOULD go wrong in this situation if we tried to do that. It's one thing to swap an axle in a lit garage, it's another on the side of the road with rudimentary tools.
Driver wants to do number 2. I've already located a Princess Auto (thank the lord baby jeebus, only 5 minutes away) so we book it there and buy an axle, electric brakes, and about $100 in tools to supplement what we already have. We also buy two rims with trailer tires already mounted.
So we start. Keep in mind, it's -10*C out with 75% humidity (crazy fog, my gloves got wet standing still). All of the nuts are frozen and the threads corroded/filled with crap, so we basically have to use the breaker bar for the entire time. 4 ubolts = 8 nuts to get the axle off. When all is said and done, we spent over 3 hours between running back and forth to PA and removing the axle. We finally get that bugger loose:
(crew chief)
So it's the moment of truth, we go to put the axle in. The locating holes for the axle on the springs locating bolt? Off by 1cm center to center.
berkeley!
At this point, everybody is pretty tired. But I'm not a quitter. I tell the guys we are unloading the open car packing everything up, and driving to Winnipeg asap. My driver seemed a little hesitant, I didn't understand why at first... he didn't seem very interested in driving the car 200kms. So I did.
I'd never been in this open class car, but it is a monster to say the least. The chassis is an '02 WRX with a Spec C jdm 2.0L STi drivetrain swapped into it by SwapShop based out of Quebec. The turbo on it? Worth about $3k. The car is gnarly! So we're loaded up, hop in to our respective vehicles, and hit the road. The car seems funny, I can't lightly apply throttle, if I do, it bucks until I lean into it a bit. And then (even at 2000rpm) the turbo spools like a mother (WITHOUT anti-lag on). After 2 minutes of this, I decide there is something wrong with the car as you can't hold the throttle at steady state cruise without the car bucking fairly violently.
I signal for my team to pull the rig over. The short explanation that I get is, "that's the way it is". That's the way it is?! There are times when we have to transit 100kms in this thing between stages, and you're telling me we can't steady state cruise?
Yes, that is exactly what he is telling me. So I man up, and pulse and glide this car for 2 hours to Winnipeg. Sure, it was fun the odd time stomping on it in 6th at 100km/h only to be going 160km/h with the snap of your fingers. But not only did the car not like steady state, it also didn't like just grabbing throttle. As the rev's climb, you have to continually add throttle or the car starts to buck. So this 100-130 game is really quick and continuous. Did I mention I had to do it for 2 hours, after having already been awake for 16 hours?
We got into Winnipeg at 3 in the morning. I had found a major trailer dealer/repairer/renter that required us to go through downtown Winnipeg (at morning rush hour) to get to. We wake up at 6:45 (~3 hours of sleep) and are hitting the road by 7:30. Stop to fill up the truck since we have some spare time.
We get to the trailer dealership, walk on in, and ask them if they can get us back on the road in 30 minutes? No dice, minimum 1.5 hours because our cheap car hauler has a funky sized axle mounting centre to centre measurement, so they'll have to make custom mounts for us. That's no good, we need to be gone NOW. So, we rent a trailer. All said and done, we are back on the road with everything on the rental trailer and instructions for the shop to have our trailer fixed by 9:45am. Things are looking up!
So, back on the transcanada. Again, we are doing about 130, because once you get into Ontario the speed drops to 90 and it goes from a divided 4 lane highway to a 2 lane that sees an insane amount of semi traffic.
Everything is now uneventful. I am sleeping in the back of the crew can (we folded the rear seats and setup a cool bed deal on the floor, as I'm only 5' 8" bending my knees a bit had me snug as a bug)! After passing Kenora, I wake up to my driver and crew chief asking each other "what was that noise?". They thought we had had a blow out on the trailer, so we pulled over as soon as it was safe to do so (the highway was doing to shoulders half as wide as a car and single lane each way). After quickly hopping out of the truck, we found out two rally rims/tires had gotten loose and left the trailer 
Praying that nothing had happened, we turned around to see if we could locate the $800 in rims/rubber that was lying somewhere near the road. After traveling back about 2kms, up ahead was a Rav4 pulled over with it's flashers on. We knew right away what had happened.
When we initially passed them before thinking we had a flat, one of the tires took off while we were heading towards them at about 100 metres distance. The 65 year old lady driving (husband in the passenger seat reading a book), had no time to react, and the tire/rim took out the driver's side front corner of the car. I found the rim in the ditch with the tire on it, the inner lip of the rim was folded all the way outward and touching the spokes (it had folded over on itself).
So we exchanged insurance, and waited for the police to arrive. Apparently at this time quite close by, a drunk resident of the area was standing on a frozen lake and shooting at his neighbours, so we ended up waiting quite a while. It was at this point we were done. I wanted to continue on as we could still make recce, but it was probably not the best for my driver to race as he was quite shaken. Everything that could go wrong did, self inflicted or otherwise. When the dust had settled, we booked it back to Winnipeg to pick up our fixed trailer. After swapping everything back over, we had a large meal at Earl's, and then drove straight (with one 15 minute stop) back to Calgary.
I was back in Calgary this morning by 8:30am, picked up some FIA belts and cage padding for the Tal[hoon] and headed on back to Red Deer.
In all honesty, by far the worst trip I've ever been on. And the most terrible part of it (besides the tire incident) is just how WELL it went when things were going good. Even at the bitter end, we realistically would have been fine (but tired, and a stressed driver) to get out to Quebec.
Apparently it's just not one of those weekends. This did speed up the process of me picking up my free 1993 Chev Z71 with a blown 4L60E though, so I guess that is looking on the bright side.
Moral of the story (imo). DON'T RUSH TRIPS. PRACTICE SAFE TRAILER MAINTANENCE. IF YOU THINK IT'S TIED DOWN WELL, ADD ANOTHER STRAP JUST IN CASE!
I wish we had done these things
I'm running on about 6 hours of sleep over the past 72 stressful hours. I know it's sort of hard to read, and a bit all of the place (and some things are just downright spelled/worded wrong) so I'll clean it up tomorrow.
