Alan Perry's Blog

Tuesday May 31, 2005

Rocky Mountain Rally 2005

This past weekend, I ran in the Rocky Mountain Rally, held around Calgary, Alberta. I was co-driving for Richard Penrose in what was probably the coolest rally car that I have ever been in. The car was a 1996 Ford Escort Cosworth, used by Colin McRae and Nicky Grist to recce during the 1999 WRC season.

Since we were running in the Regional rally, the event started Friday night with two runs through a spectator stage set-up in a motocross park in Calgary. These stages were just for show, offering little opportunity to improve position and huge opportunity to break the car and end the rally. Richard did not push too hard and we were fourth overall in the Regional.

The next two legs of the rally were in the Porcupine Hills, about two hours south of Calgary.

On the transit to the first stage of the day, the gearbox popped out of fourth gear. It had done this once during the shakedown and once during the odometer check, but it did not seem like a consistent problem. After we started the stage, we found out that we were wrong.

The stage was mostly high speed runs, fourth gear stuff, but fourth gear kept popping out. To make matters worse, the clutch started acting up and the gearbox was baulky when selecting other gears. We finished the stage with a mediocre time and transited to what would be the last stage for us.

At the start line, the clutch was slipping. Despite the clutch pedal being pressed all of the way to the floor, the car would creep forward and we were very concerned about being hit with a jumped start penalty. Once the stage started, things were better. There were more third gear turns and the car felt faster. Unfortunately, the problem with fourth gear caused Richard to leave the car in third gear longer than he should have. This, combined with the smallish radiator in the car and the relatively warm air temperature, caused the coolant temperature to rise. A couple km from the end of the stage, the cooling system failed in a cloud of white smoke.

That's rally. Of course, that is easy for me to say - I don't have to get a Cossie gearbox rebuilt and buy a larger radiator!

( May 31 2005, 10:18:57 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]