Day 2 – The great 129 mile run down Punchaw Road
Feb 19th, 2008 by admin
The day could not have been prettier. A bright blue, cloudless sky. A brilliant white snow pack. And 450 miles to go.
The first scheduled run of the day, the Quesnel Ice Slalom, has been canceled. There’s too much snow on the Speedway and it can’t be plowed so a substitute TSD (”The 11% Grade”) has been added. We’re still fooling around with our computer and we’re still off and piling up points. We have to get this resolved today. Mabe we’ll look in the computer manual for hints. Or maybe not.
We run out the first short transit to a staging area in a local school parking lot. The kids there are all out inspecting the cars. It is quite a site, 24 rally cars and additional staff rally cars and the sweep trucks, and the kids seem to love it. But soon the kids are called back into school and we’re off on the first TSD of the day.
The TSD is uneventful though there was one area where it was downhill and off-camber and the only way to do it was to slow down and forget the CAS. Then a burst of speed to get back on time. No problem. Except the rally computer is still of distance. We still don’t have the speed factor correct.
We’ve been nibbling away at the speed factor and we’ve been getting closer but only by small amounts. In a fit of desperation and a look in the manual for some hints, we do a calculation that says that we need a BIG change in the correction factor. Okay here goes.
After the short transit, we’re at the start of the Blackwater Road TSD. We do a big correction on the factor. At the end of the TSD we’re almost dead on the final distance. Woo-Hoo! We may have this. Only a small under error which is great since we’ve been having big over errors. We may get this righ, yet.
We start the transit to the Frasier Lake TSD by heading down BlackwaterRoad and turning left on Punchaw Road. There’s the first casualty: the #10 WRX is high centered on a snow bank. The #18 is towing him off amid a crowb of kibbitzing rally teams. Ah, the brutality of it all.
This is the part where Barbara is surely missed…….(MANual) do not know why the word man is included as we all know about the unwritten “man-law” that has been officially entered into the Book of Truth that NO MAN shall ever pick-up, be seen with or refer to any type of manual. Hope you have had a safe day!
Nothing like being cold and 2500 miles from home and still being abused by your friends via the internet.
Pitch it sideways and throw some snow for me !
Cooke
Manuals?! We don’t need no stinking manuals! Well maybe just a little bit.
Cooke, you’d love it. Another competitor was telling a local person in Whitehorse that a normal TSD rally has a TSD stage and then a transit. This rally, however, has a TSD and then a special stage and then a TSD and then a special stage…
The specials are 200, 300, even 400 miles at 85 mph. On snow, ice and slush. Of course there’s almost no traffic and we have radios to warn of oncoming traffic. We just have to keep it on the road and not do as high speed stuff. That’s all.
C8-)