2009 Rally of the Tall Pines - Nissan 240SX in-car video
Posted by Ferdinand
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A2 Upper Old Hastings II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpNHS5m7Vw4
After Service-1, we do a second pass on Upper Old Hastings, then Old Detlor, and The Peanut, before heading back to Service-2. We still have that annoying whine in our audio system. It's the alternator causing that. It gets worse later on when the alternator has to power the full rally-light rack. Gotta fix that sometime... The road was quite a bit more chewed up on this second pass, with lots of deep "loose" stuff. In there the car either "aquaplanes" up onto the loose fluffy dirt and loses contact with the road surface, or it bogs down through the deep stuff and loses speed. We were six seconds slower on this second pass, but everybody else was slower too. We extended our lead over Kocandrle/Brandt by another 11 seconds to 18 seconds, but it's still far too early to get over-confident. 
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A8 Middle Old Hastings I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5a2sPW-XSE
After our Service stop, we're back on the road for the long TOUGH loop of Middle Old Hastings, Lower Old Hastings, Egan Creek, and a quick run on the short Golton spectator stage. It's hard to imagine that, before the construction of Hwy 28, Old Hastings Road used to be the only north-south highway joining Bancroft to the rest of the world. This is one absolutely amazing road! Upper Old Hastings, which you saw used twice as the first couple of stages, is a superhighway compared to Middle Old Hastings, and Lower Old Hastings can hardly be called a road at all. But the 45 km length of these three sections combined is just about the ultimate one could ever ask for in a stage rally road! That is, of course, unless you're prone to tossing your cookies... There are a LOT of jumps and crests in here. At 2:35 into this video clip on Middle Old Hastings, watch for the flag and scaffolding erected by Maciej Janiak (check out his website!) and other photographers. They suspended a camera from a boom held out over the stage road to take these awesome photos! 
We got some big air at 2:40, at the jump immediately following the photographer's crest. "Oh, ya." 
There are lots more big jumps on this stage. 5:30 "Whaboom!" At the finish Martin says, "Add that to the list of stages where you didn't puke." It's a discouragingly short list so far though. Note the friendly police officers at the very end of the clip, holding up traffic for us and waving us straight through the stop sign. Not only are we legally permitted, encouraged even, to behave like hooligans on these awesome roads, but the police are there to safely escort us through intersections as well. Sanctioned stage rallying is sooooo awesome! What's not to love about this sport? Other than the puking of course... |
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A9 Lower Old Hastings I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-LAIZ6DdGo
Having survived Middle Old Hastings, it's straight across the intersection and immediately into the start of Lower Old Hastings. This southern continuation of Old Hastings Rd is twice as long as the Middle section, twice as rough, and has twice as many jumps. Oh boy. --- Here's something interesting. At just 13 seconds into the video, as we're still taking off, Martin makes an uncharacteristic small mistake and blows the upshift to 3rd gear, forcing him to take a quick glance away from the road to look down at the shift lever. Thankfully, Martin's primary focus always is to keep the car safely between the trees. We're never in any danger at all. But it's interesting to note how this momentary distraction is enough to make him lose track of what I've been reading to him from the notes. Even though this section is all fast sixes and fives with long open straights and only small crests, Martin noticeably eases off the throttle once he's no longer 100% sure which one of these crests match up to what I'm currently telling him. At 24 seconds into the clip he admits he's no longer with me and asks for clarification about an upcoming L5 into R4. After that, it's all good again, and we're back in sync with each other. It's a nice example. The driver needs to do a LOT more than simply drive fast all the time. At the same time he has to be listening to and interpreting everything the co-driver is telling him, and constantly matching that to what he sees coming at him on the road. If that information stream is interrupted in any way, it becomes impossible to maintain the same high speed pace. --- The first painful jump comes at 3:20, a big jump landing directly into a second jump. Bang. oof. "ohhh man." Nick & Kelly Mathew were locked in a fierce battle with Chris Martin and Phil Narini for the Ontario Regional Performance Rally Championship, but at 8:05 and 8:10 we pass Nick & Kelly, forced out with a blown head gasket. "Aw no." That's a sad way to end the season. That brief distraction now almost threw me completely off my notes. This stuff isn't easy, the road is busy, busy, busy, and the notes require my full concentration. Now I'm fumbling to keep up, and I'm way too slow over the next several calls, then completely wrong when I call a Right-Three, which actually is a Right-Five. Martin hears me say R3 and gears down, before I correct myself and say R5, whereupon he immediately shifts back up again. Martin still has everything safely under control. We're in no danger whatsoever. It would have been much worse if I had announced the corner to be a fast R5 when really it was a tight R3. That could be bad. But the damage was done anyway and I'm sure we unnecessarily threw away a second or two right there due to my fumbling of the notes. This is what makes rallying so cool, and so entirely different from any type of solo racing. Rallying is very very much a team sport. If the two of us don't mesh effectively together, you can clearly see in these two examples how we obviously become slower. It's really tough to maintain the required level of concentration for this stuff over the full length of such a gruelling rally. Despite these small slip-ups, we still managed a respectable time of 9:51 over this 14.2 km stage (avg 86.5 km/h), 17th quickest on this stage out of the 35 cars still running. What's astounding though is that champions Pat Richard and Alan Ockwell did this stage almost TWO minutes quicker than us, in only 8:03 (avg 105.8 km/h)!! What amazes me more than anything is that they're doing so much more than merely driving faster than us. We like to pretend that their advantage can be explained away and dismissed as merely a result of their much superior equipment. However, the bit that I find the most astounding is the fact that Alan [without puking] is reading similar notes to Pat, only at that much faster a pace, and Pat is actually hearing and digesting all of that stuff WHILE driving at a pace that's TWO minutes faster than ours.  That's something that I find almost impossible to comprehend and totally humbling.
Two stages in a row now without puking... 
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A11 Golton Spectator Stage I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPMPyBKVkR4
This is a short Spectator Stage set up on the Bancroft rallycross track. Martin and I have never liked this stage. For some reason we're always dead slow here. With all the huge floodlights and camera strobes blinding us, it's really difficult to see anything. The super-tight slippery hairpins don't suit our Rwd car at all. And, due to an unfortunate and inappropriate selection in our choice of recce vehicle, we never made it this far in recce the day before and thus didn't get to see this track in daylight. Basically we just don't like this stage. We weren't the slowest of everyone, but pretty damn close, 27th out the 32 cars still running. Martin says this stage is a waste of good gas. My only contribution, trying to look on the bright side, was that fortunately this stage is so short there isn't even enough time to throw up. From here we head back for another Service break. Time enough to once again stagger off to the washroom to rinse out my assortment of plastic bags in preparation for the "last leg" of the rally. photo by: Maciej Janiak 
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At this point, it no longer sounds like much fun
But I'm guessing you'll be looking back on this event with fond 
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I've just started this thread, so I'm a little in the dark, but if you're puking for any length of time Ferdy, I don't think that's good for you, seriously. Please take care, Rick I don't know how navigators do it, I swear! |
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B2 Middle Old Hastings II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtM6EUIYXzQ
Not even a full minute into this stage yet and we very nearly finished our rally in a ditch. I'm pretty sure that was my fault. At 40 seconds (0:40) into the video we do a L6 short over jump, and 80 metres later (at 0:47) there's a L5 over small crest that tightens to 4 (at 0:53). After that, there's a small crest and L3! But I lose track and get too far ahead in the notes. When I looked up at (0:53) and saw where the L5 tightened to a 4, it looked pretty tight to me and I wrongly assumed that we must already be doing the L3. So I jumped ahead and called the following note, which is 30 metres to a small crest and R3. That looked correct to me because, from where I called that note at 0:54, there was a short 30 metre straight into a crest. But the road goes left from there, not right. Martin, from what I've just told him, now expects the road to go right. But what's this? Not only does the road go left instead, it actually goes very sharp left, i.e. "That was the L3." Whoa! At 0:56 we run out of road, fall into the ditch, and very nearly clip some trees, while Martin keeps his foot in it and calmly wrestles the car back onto the road with no damage whatsoever. Perhaps it was because he was feeling guilty about forcing me into doing this last long National loop, whereas I was desperately wishing we could have retired at the end of the Regional portion of the rally. Otherwise Martin would probably have smacked me in the head for such a dumb mistake. At 2:45 we pass the photographer's scaffolding with the big Canadian flag and... 
... I promptly get felled by another yak-attack. Maybe I'm allergic to photographers. Whatever, I'm totally knocked-out this time and can't stop puking until the very finish of the stage. At 5:00 we come across the wreck of Richard Burton & Dean Hopkins. They went straight off, standing the car up and over its nose, landing on its roof in the trees. We were relieved to see them out of the car with their triangles out and holding the 'OK' sign, but that looked really nasty. |
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Part 3/3 - B4 Egan Creek II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1xEgGXZ8uo
This is the dash to the finish on the fast smooth road. Watching the video again now, I just realized that I was one instruction behind for most of the opening bit of this video. Yeesh. Still, we survived and made it to the finish in one piece, with the only damage to the car being the one lamp we busted trying to push Hardy and Adam's Subaru out of the way. Our primary objective heading into this 2009 Rally of the Tall Pines was to try to stay ahead of Peter Kocandrle and Jimmy Brandt. We were successful in that, ultimately finishing 51 seconds ahead of them at the end of the night. With the usual expected high rate of attrition in this rally, there were 23 DNFs out of 51 entries, even a top-ten finish in the National standings might have been possible for us. But not this time. We finished 13th overall in the National results and 2nd of the twenty 2wd entries, 4th overall and 1st 2wd in the Regional portion. Considering Martin was forced to drive a large portion of this rally blind without notes, while I was busy entertaining myself with other amusing activities, I'd say we came out of this rally in surprisingly good shape.
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