Monday June 20, 2005 Alan Perry's Blog
Monday June 20, 2005 After competing in the Rim of the World Rally at the beginning of May, I was really looking forward to a break. The next rally that I planned on running was Treeline in the middle of July.
As usual, things did not go to plan. I have had last minute requests to co-drive every rally within driving distance and I must be addicted to this rally thing because I keep saying yes.
The latest last minute request came from Peter Van Bogart who would be driving his 2002 Mitsubishi Evo VII RS that he normally just rents out.
Mountain Trials is based in Merritt, British Columbia, Canada and is a recce event. No prepared stage notes. Just a route book and whatever notes you can take driving the stage roads for two-and-a-half hours.
Since I had not done a recce event (without stage notes) in over a year and Pete had never done recce before, the notes were a complete mess. I wasn't sure how I wanted to note things. Pete was driving too fast for me to get everything down. We got lost at one point and had to end recce early because we didn't have enough gas in the car.
As I was rewriting the notes so that I could read them in the rally car during the event, I was thinking about just throwing them all out because I knew that I would get lost in the notes.
In the end, it didn't matter. The notes were good enough for Pete. He started driving back before stage notes and pace notes were used in the US, so he can read the road. On two of the stages, we actually ran out of notes before the end of the stage, but Pete could deal with it.
Our only goal was to finish without wrecking the car. It is a full Group N spec car and everything on it is expensive to replace. However, at the end of the first two legs, we were in second overall, 58 seconds behind the fast local team of Scott Trinder/Bill Westhead. Pete was going to take it easy on the last leg until he found out that he was only 18 seconds ahead of the car in third.
It didn't seem like we were going that much faster, but we were. We won the first two stages of the leg, taking over 30 seconds off of Trinder/Westhead's lead. To complicate matters, an oil seal on the gearbox failed and the car was pouring gear oil onto the exhaust. We had opened the gap back to third by a large margin. Because of this and the gearbox problem, we cruised to the finish.
So, we ended the rally second overall. I was just happy to finish.
( Jun 20 2005, 07:23:52 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
