Ontario Road Rally Championship (ORRC) Rally No. 1- January Jaunt
The first rally of the 2010 ORRC series was held January 17, starting in Waterdown, ON, just north of Burlington. Gary and I left here with the Mazda on the trailer around 8 AM and arrived shortly after 2, with a few stops for comfort, fuel and refreshments. The weather was dry and not too cold, so rally conditions would be relatively easy. We had plenty of time to unload, register, chat with old friends and relax before the drivers’ meeting at 3 o’clock.
These events are normally about 200 km in length, but this one was close to 300 km and it took a total of 6 hours to complete. Instructions were pretty straightforward, although after 4-5 hours anything can be challenging! We went as far west as Brantford, where there was a rest stop about 2/3 of the way through and where we picked up the balance of the instructions and a second scorecard.
We had decided before beginning that we would rely completely on the rally computer to keep us on time, rather than Gary trying to calculate ETA’s madly along the way. This turned out to be very sensible, because there were a lot of changes in average speed which would have challenged any calculator wizard. We really didn’t have any problems with the instructions and made only a couple of small turning errors, quickly corrected. At the beginning of the second half we started out in the wrong direction, corrected it as quickly as possible and requested a Time Allowance of 3.5 minutes at the first control. Somehow we were scored 3.5 minutes early at that control, but I don’t see how it’s possible.
In any case, we ended up scoring second place in Novice class with a score of 12.8 – our best score in ORRC to date. By the time we finished and loaded the car up it was about 10 PM, so we didn’t stay long enough to hear the final results or receive our trophies. Instead, we headed out for Pickering to stay with Les and Maureen, arriving there shortly before midnight. We had a short visit after arriving and then hit the sack willingly. The next morning, they made us a great breakfast of French toast, bacon and fresh fruit, with lots of coffee. We took plenty of time to have a proper visit before hitting the highway for Ottawa. On the way home we didn’t get the usual improvement in fuel consumption while driving east, maybe because of all the mud caked on the Mazda. It looked like it had been been in a wind tunnel and they were using mud instead of smoke to trace the air flow.
So our ORRC season is off to a good start. The next event is the all-night rally in Bancroft in February, which I refuse to do. All night is just too much! After that comes the Spring Run-Off in April, which is always a good one. In March I will attend the RallySport Ontario annual meeting and banquet, to receive a trophy for finishing third in Novice class for 2009. It will be nice to be recognized.
Open Road Rally No. 1 – January 23, 2010
The Open Road rally series is run by the Motorsports Club of Ottawa, under the direction of Open Road Motorsports. It was formerly known as the MCO Summer Nights rally series, but Open Road decided to begin the series during the winter months, to expose more people to winter rallying. The rally began and ended in downtown Almonte at the Superior Restaurant and lasted for about 150 km. Gary and I met at the restaurant and went over our strategy based on the good result we’d had the previous week.
It was a beautiful sunny day with temperatures just below freezing. We hadn’t had any significant snowfall for three weeks, so the paved roads were clear. The gravel side roads were covered with a thin layer of snow and ice, but all had been recently sanded, so traction was available in most areas. The speeds were a little on the aggressive side on the gravel roads, but because of the sanding I had no problem maintaining or exceeding the required average speeds. It was fun, but not dangerous at all. The new snow tires make a big difference on ice!
Section 1 was straightforward distance-to-turns to the odo check, continuing with varying speeds beyond that to its end. Section 2 was simple tulips, listed in the correct order, with only one tricky intersection. The diagram was a bit odd, since we came to a stop sign a few hundredths of a kilometre early for our turn, where a no-exit road intersected the main road. The correct intersection for the next instruction was a hundred feet later, to the right. So we had to stop, turn right, stop again, then turn left. Initially we turned left at the first stop sign then immediately recognized the error. After turning around, I had to make up a little time once we got back on course asnd we ended up taking a few points for being late at the next control.
The next section was a hand-drawn map showing the various twists and turns in the route, but without any distances or cross streets marked. There was a table of instructions on the side that only covered the turns at specified distances, arranged in a way that made it a little difficult to read at a glance. I missed a turn by not realizing how close we were to it when Gary read the instruction, so we were about 1.5 minutes behind. Then Gary missed reading about a turn onto Darling Rd., so we drove for about 8 minutes in an incorrect direction, until it became obvious we were off course. By the time we found a place to turn around and got back on track, we’d lost about 17 minutes. When we got to the next control I asked for a Time Allowance of 18.5 minutes, which turned out to be a bit too much. Right after this control, we missed a turn at an intersection where we should have jogged right, then left, to stay on the same road (name). The line map didn’t really show this jog, so we ended up finishing the section about 4 kilometres early, somehow having gotten back on the right road. We suspected we’d missed a checkpoint in the section we’d missed, so I began driving faster than the required speed, to minimize the effects of a missed control – usually a 20 minute penalty plus late time at the next control.
The next section used tulips made out of tiny fragments of a map, which were a little hard to read, since portions of the road names had been clipped off. We did well in spite of that, until we came over a hill and found a fellow competitor in the ditch. The roads had been plowed with a large blade, so the ditches were full of snow and looked solid. They had stopped to check the instructions and inadvertently drove off the edge of the road into soft snow in their Jetta. We were about to try pulling them out, when a 4WD fellow competitor came along. We hooked them up and pushed a bit, finally freeing the Jetta. We lost about 9 minutes there, so we informed the workers at the next control and kept going.
The final section was non-accumulative distance to turns, which represented no problem at all. When we checked in at the restaurant, I told Robert – the routemaster and scorekeeper – about the delay with the Jetta. It would be up to him to decide how to handle the scoring, since we had no TA allowance available to use in order to offset the delay. Robert also told us that we hadn’t missed a control, since the checkpoint worker had become ill and had gone home. There might have been a control in the section that we missed, but it wasn’t manned. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized that I had probably compensated quite well for the 9 minutes delay in towing the Jetta, by driving too fast to compensate for the “missed” control. So I told Robert to score the towing delay in the normal fashion, i.e. to record our actual time at the next control as reported, with no correction. This turned out to be very wise, as we were only 1.5 minutes late due to all of these factors.
So we ended up with a score of 4.9 – good enough for second place behind a pair of young guys I’d never seen before. Our normal competitors in Expert had unexplained problems, which put them well behind. So we have begun this season quite well also, but must continue to focus on staying on route!
Open Road Rally #2 – March 3, 2010
The second rally in the MCO Open Road series was held March 3, 2010, beginning at 8 PM at the Cheshire Cat pub near Carp, ON. When Gary and I arrived just before 7, the place was jammed – both upstairs and down – and I wondered how many entrants we would have. But as it turned out, most of the people were just eating and drinking, although we did have 12 teams entered and an equal number of volunteer checkpoint workers. We registered and got our car number, then hung around chatting with all the familiar faces until the drivers’ meeting at 7:45. The weather was great; about zero Celsius, with no precipitation expected. And we’d had a very mild February, so there shouldn’t be any snow on the roads.
We were car number 4, so we left at 8:04 and proceeded through a small number of instructions to the odometer check at about 8.8 km. We made a small calibration adjustment there and then completed the rest of Section 1 very confidently, since it was simple distance-to-turns instructions with a few changes in average speed (CAS). The first checkpoint (CP) was about 0.5 km before the end of section and we thought we should be really close to zeroing it, but we were one second too late for that and took a penalty of 0.1. When a CP is that close to the end of section (EOS) it can get a bit tricky to finish the section on time, since you must accelerate really hard to achieve the desired average speed in only half a kilometre – in this case I think it was 67 km/h. But we made it, only to be held up at the beginning of Section 2 by the car in front, which waited 5-10 seconds before starting out from the stop sign. Out of frustration, I passed them as soon as I could and we got up to our CAS of 72 km/h pretty briskly.
Section 2 was unusually long, at 48 km and was divided into three parts. The first part was simple tulip diagrams with numerous CAS and a very slow section through a village. We had no trouble with that, although we almost missed a turn where the road we were on went to the right, with a side road dead ahead. I stopped about 10 metres past the corner, backed up and made the correct turn, only losing about 10 seconds. From there on I increased the speed by about one km/h to compensate. There was a CP in this part which we hit about 1 second early, for another small penalty.
The second part of the Section was to be driven at a fairly aggressive speed (68 km/h I believe) on a twisty, hilly side road, using stage rally type pace notes to guide the driver. These notes allow the navigator to tell the driver how tight each corner will be and what lies over the next blind crest. It is a very liberating feeling to be able to press hard when you can’t see what’s ahead, trusting in the person who prepared the pace notes, and in the navigator, to keep you out of trouble. This part went really well, until we caught up to a local resident who was driving about 55 km/h, obviously without pace notes! They finally turned off in a different direction after the pace notes ended and we hit a piece of highway where I could try to make up time. We figured we’d lost about 30 seconds, although we didn’t do a calculation, so I drove at an average of over 85 km/h while I could, to make up the lost time. Shortly after this we came to a CP and didn’t take a Time Allowance (TA), but we should have. We were still 30 seconds late.
The third part of Section 2 was back to simple tulip diagrams with frequent speed changes. It was going really well until disaster struck. I heard Gary say the next instruction was to “stay straight at 4.8 km”, but the road was pretty twisty and the speed was fairly aggressive (at 68 I think), so I couldn’t look at the odometer display on the computer. We came to a T intersection (from the left) and I didn’t know that was the place where the instruction applied. Looking at the tire tracks on the road, it appeared as though the main road followed the sweeping curve to the right, so that’s where I went. The reason I could see the tire tracks was that the intersection was covered with snow which had frozen into a rough icy surface. I was going way too fast for those conditions and when I braked it was too late. We slid across the intersection and ploughed into the two-foot snow bank on the front left corner of the car. This car has one driving wheel at the front and it’s the left one, so we were stuck really well. Fortunately a couple of our fellow competitors stopped to help. We couldn’t budge the car by hand, so I hooked up the tow rope at the right rear and the guys in the Subaru pulled us out. I should have checked the clock when we slammed into the snow bank, but was too frustrated to think of it in time. Had I done that, I would have known how much time we lost. Once we got going, we came upon the next CP in less than a kilometre and I requested a TA of 5.5 minutes. As it turned out, I should have asked for 7.5 – we took a 1.8 penalty there. But at least there was no damage to the car, although we scooped a fair amount of snow into the grille and the splash shield under the engine. The plastic bumper cover was deformed but straightened itself before we finished the rally. We need to work on communications a bit more, so I don’t have to continually glance over at the computer’s odometer to know when the next instruction is coming up.
Section 3 was a very short one – at 10 km – and consisted solely of a string diagram. In this type of instruction, the route you will travel is shown as a straight line (or it can be curved), with intersecting roads shown as little tails or V’s sticking off the side. The proper way to read it is to say “leave two on the left”, if the little V is on the left side. In this example, at a four-way intersection you would turn right. These particular instructions had us making about 8-10 little turns in a village, basically going around in circles for about a kilometre – at 24 km/h. The rest was easy enough, but there were numerous speed changes and turns close to one another. Somehow we lost about 45 seconds in this section and took a penalty of 0.8 at CP 5.
The final section was more simple tulips with frequent turns and changes in speed. In cases like this it’s useful to know well in advance how frequently the speed should change and how quickly. We didn’t quite achieve this level of awareness and accumulated about 30 seconds of lateness, without missing a turn – much to our surprise.
When we completed the rally back at the Cheshire Cat, we zero’d our only control! Better late than never. Gary bought beer for the guys who had helped us out of the snow bank and we took some good-natured kidding for having hit it. I also learned that Glen (the organizer and owner of Open Road), had put a special note in the pace notes, where we had to jog left and right at an intersection. He likes to tease me about past mistakes. In this case, the note said “[my name] pay attention!” One of the other drivers told me this note made him think there was a CP coming up, since I missed one last year. Gary had read the note to me, but I thought he was just talking – not reading. I guess I now have a reputation.
So we finished with a score of 3.8, which is not bad. But it was only good enough for fourth place in Expert. The other teams did really well – and didn’t hit anything! The car is fine and we’re staying tuned up for the provincial series – the next one is April 17 in the Peterborough area. And we are looking forward to it!
Spring Run-Off Rally – ORRC No. 3 – April 17, 2010
This is a fun event, run in the vicinity of Hastings, ON, which is southeast of Peterborough. Unfortunately this year the date coincided with an instructor evaluation session at Calabogie Motorsports Park, which was announced rather late and I did not want to miss. So we did not compete, but in 2009 we missed three events and still finished third overall, so I was not concerned about the impact of missing this event.
Open Road Rally No. 3 – April 28, 2010
This rally was a good one – Robert used some different instruction sets and a couple of very good roads to the southwest of Ottawa. We started as usual at the Cheshire Cat on Carp Rd. but instead of going west, we quickly turned south towards Richmond and Ashton. There were a total of twelve cars, including three rank novices.
We made an early mistake by misreading a tulip diagram and had to take a time allowance of 3.5 minutes at CP 2, which gave us a penalty of 0.6 early because it was 30 seconds too much; but that can’t be helped since you can only take TA’s on the thirty seconds. We had tried to compensate for that by making up some time, but miscalculated. During this stage we travelled on McCaffrey Rd. out of Ashton, which is a good, twisty gravel road and the subject of the first video.
Section 2 consisted of several long, straight sections heading south towards Kemptville/Burritt’s Rapids, which were just a set-up to allow us to use Pinery Rd. It runs from Ashton side road to Franktown and is one of the best roads in the area. It’s the subject of the second video. On both it and McCaffrey, I believe the average speed was 68 km/h. This doesn’t sound very fast but it was challenging enough, especially for the three newbie teams.
From here on we didn’t really make any mistakes, but we got held up by some ambiguous instructions and the difficulty of reading street signs in the dark. Section 4 was a peculiar combination of cumulative distance-to-turns and incremental distance-to-turns, coupled with some turns which had no distances provided – it was interesting, to say the least. There were six controls, including the finish, and we zeroed three of them. On the others we took a total of 1.3 penalty points, putting us into second place overall and second in Expert – one of our best results ever.
I have a total of an hour and a half of video, but these are the best roads. The camera angle leaves something to be desired, but short of mounting it on the dash, I think it’s the best I can do. It should be rather different in the daylight – hopefully clearer, so you can read the computer display.
Videos are at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfUbKO1a_c8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68CsPRT59GU
Blossom Rally – ORRC No. 4 – May 8, 2010
The Blossom Rally is held in the area around Campbellville and Milton, ON, which is about 500 km from Ottawa. So Gary and I left my house a little after 7 AM on that Saturday morning with the Mazda on my trailer and drove to the Mohawk Inn at Campbellville, taking about 5 hours. The first thing that happened after our arrival was that I was given the trophies we had earned at the January Jaunt but didn’t stay long enough to receive. So now the bookshelf will fill up a little more. We registered, had some lunch and talked with a number of fellow competitors until it was time for the drivers’ meeting. The weather looked pretty ominous, since it was only about 4 C and very windy. The forecast had been calling for rain all day with a risk of snow, but as it happened there was very little precipitation of any kind – just lots of high winds.
The rally was divided into two stages, the first being exclusively a provincial event and the second being combined with a local Kitchener club event. We were car number 6, so we left the Inn at 2:06 and began Stage A. The first section was a little odd, in that there was no odometer check per se, just a precisely measured end of section mileage and time schedule. It was all simple distance-to-turn instructions and Section 2 was straightforward tulip diagrams. There were numerous changes in average speed, so precision was called for. There were also numerous checkpoints in Section 2 – a toal of seven I believe – situated at each successive turn and speed change mileage. We did pretty well on those, although we were 0.4 points early overall for the seven controls.
Section 3 had a new feature, which was do-it-yourself controls. These were unmanned landmarks at which we simply had to record our measured distance as we passed them. The key here was to stay on route and have the correct cumulative kilometres at each point. Even though we missed one and had to double back, we got a perfect zero score on the section as a result of careful manipulation of the rally computer. The time allowed for the section was fairly generous, so our miscue didn’t cost us anything in the form of a timing penalty.
As I recall, the Section 4 was based on a map with very few roads labelled. All we needed to do was take the next left or right turn (or whatever) and follow along with the average speeds provided on a separate sheet. We did pretty well in this section although we accumulated 0.4 penalty points for being early at two controls. This must be described as driver error, although it is affected by the precision of the rally computer and the timeliness of resetting the average speed when instructed.
I don’t remember the format of the instructions for Section 5, but it had a table of average speeds at the bottom of the sheet. The table had two columns, requiring fairly frequent speed changes. Unfortunately, Gary didn’t use all of the data in the table, so our average speed was way off. We wound up with 2.7 late and 1.3 early as a result. Just before the end of section, there were two unusual features. The first was a dead-end turn-around, which we’ve never seen before. The second was a route control, where we stopped and checked in, receiving a sticker with no time out on it. The process took us about 1:10 to complete and the rules say “a one minute time allowance must be given in calculating the elapsed time to the next control”. We didn’t know this and I still don’t understand how it works, but somehow we were scored two minutes early at the end of section control, which included some calculation error on Gary’s part as well as this odd rule.
So for Stage A we had a total of 6.9 points, putting us in fifth place – not very satisfying.
Between Stages A and B there a meal break of a little over an hour, during which I also filled up the tank. Stage A had been only 130 kms and Stage B wouldn’t be any longer, so the total rally was a reasonable distance. We just relaxed for a while but didn’t have a meal, since we’d had a good lunch.
We began Stage B and 6:06 and finished at 8:29 PM. I must have getting pretty tired by then, because I don’t remember much about the different instructions for each of these sections. We took three time allowances as a result of missing a couple of turns and pausing to interpret instructions. So we got an extra 1.5 penalty points for taking the TA’s. But in total we finished Stage B with 4 points, which was good enough for third place in the Stage. We did drive a couple of good roads in this Stage, which are shown in the videos. Most of the other roads were pretty straight and carried low average speeds, since the area is quite well-developed.
So overall we finished in third place with 10.9 points, but didn’t receive trophies. That’s OK. The trophies were little 2″ flower pots with fake blossoms sprouting out the top – from Giant Tiger, I think. There were at least 30 check points, so even if you’re only 1 sec late at each, that would be 3 points. We had a bunch of zero’s, plus 3 missed turns (leading to a 1.5 penalty for taking TA’s), plus some calculation errors for another couple of points. We had a problem figuring out a couple of instruction sets, which contributed another few tenths. It wasn’t a totally frustrating day, but we can do better with more attention to detail.
In the provincial standings we’re still in second place, since a couple of normal competitors worked checkpoints for their club (Kitchener-Waterloo). The winners were a couple of nice Brits in their ‘64 Triumph TR4a, who are in first place.
Videos are available here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR3T4M_LZdo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJOGWYNnl-4
MCO Open Road Rally #4 – 2 Jun2010
The fourth rally in the Open Road series was held in Almonte on a rainy evening which promised potentially torrential downpour and a tornado warning. Fortunately, the forecast was wrong and all we got were light showers throughout the evening. That was a bonus, since we drove some of the trickiest dirt roads in the Lanark Highlands area, most of which were muddy or had loose gravel. There were only six cars entered – possibly because of the weather or possibly because of the more distant starting point – so the checkpoint workers almost outnumbered the competitors. We started in the Superior restaurant but finished in the Subway restaurant which stayed open until 11 o’clock to accommodate us. Neither place made much money off us though.
There was a little twist in the instructions for Expert class, whereby we were given an envelope that couldn’t be opened until the end of Section 2. Glen said there might be a marshal at the end of that section to verify that the envelopes were still sealed. There wasn’t, but the threat prevented us from reading ahead. The instructions for Sections 3-5 weren’t all that complicated, but a little advance work would have helped, so it was a useful ruse.
We got off to a good start, zeroing the first two controls on roads that were pretty simple, although picturesque. At the third checkpoint, the volunteer was involved in some kind of heated conversation with the driver of the car in front of us, so he didn’t record our time in to the second. As it turned out, he had arrived late at the control and had completely missed giving car number one a sticker. So he also must have missed car number two’s time and a conversation resulted. I didn’t berate him, but we made a note and advised Glen and Jeannie at the next control. In the scoring, all cars were given a zero for that control, since some were scored inaccurately. At the third control we were 10 seconds late because the checkpoint was just around the corner from a speed change, so we picked up our first tenth of a point.
Then it got interesting, as we entered Umpherson’s Mill Rd and drove at speeds varying from 37 km/h to 63 km/h on a narrow, twisty, hilly old logging road. The surface wasn’t too bad but visibility was challenging because of the tight turns and steep hills, so the slow speeds were appropriate. In daylight it would have been easier. I used all six headlights to help pick up the details and our speed was pretty good. Later on it became harder to maintain speeds in the 60’s, because the first piece of a new road would be straight, lulling me into not building up a reserve of excess speed. Then when the twisty bits began, I slipped a little and couldn’t recover before checkpoint 4. So we took a penalty of 0.6 there – a time allowance wouldn’t have helped much, since there’s a 0.5 penalty for taking the first one.
The same thing happened in the next section, where there were numerous speed changes and it was hard to keep track of whether I was ahead or behind, since all of the speeds were tricky. We took a time allowance of 30 seconds at checkpoint 5, but should have taken a minute and thirty seconds. However, it didn’t affect our placing in the final scoring. We zero’d the time at the check-in at Subway, by adding 4 minutes 32 seconds to the time we reached the intersection of Mill and Bridge in Almonte. Gary tried to calculate exactly what our check-in time should be, but ran out of time. So I just told Robert what I believed it to be and it was correct.
The car ran flawlessly and we didn’t miss any turns, although we drove past an end-of-section and an intersection by a few yards, necessitating a reversal of the odometer to correct it before proceeding. It all worked out accurately and our distance measurements remained correct over the entire 115 km of the event. We have another ORRC rally in two days and I want to bleed the brakes before then, since the pedal is a bit too soft for my liking. Otherwise, we are suitably tuned up for a good run in Woodstock. We finished in third place with 1.5 points, so the competition was pretty good. That should leave us in second place in the standings, subject to seeing the final posted results.
A video of Umpherson’s Mill Rd is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBjxQVROeJU
Discover Ontario ORRC Rally – 5 June 2010
This rally would start in Woodstock, ON and finish in Brantford – with about a half hour’s drive separating the two locations. And Gary had to return to Ottawa the same night, for his daughter’s graduation the next morning. So we decided to travel to south western Ontario the night before, to spread the commute over two days. After about a 5 hour drive, we arrived at the Motel 6 Mississauga Friday night and tucked in early. Saturday morning, we had a hearty breakfast at the Sunset Grill (a Don Henley song!), and took a side trip to Legendary Motor Cars in Milton – the home of Dream Car Garage. We had a great tour of the facility, admiring all of the Cobras, Mustangs, Corvettes, muscle cars and antiques, including a beautiful 1957 Mercedes 300SL convertible. We met the owner – Peter Klutt – and talked about the Cobras and driving at Calabogie. Maybe we’ll get him up there one of these days.
A little before 11 AM we set out for Brantford, to drop off the truck and trailer before continuing to the rally start point in Woodstock. The weather looked very promising in spite of the rather gloomy forecast of intermittent showers; and it turned out to be a beautiful sunny afternoon throughout. At the truck stop in Woodstock, we gassed up and reacquainted ourselves with old friends from rallies past, before attending the drivers’ meeting and preparing to depart at 1:36 PM.
As we began the first Section, I noticed our friends in the Triumph had turned right out of the truck stop, only to reverse their direction and drive off to the left. So we read the first few lines of the instructions and realized that the very first instruction was incorrect! The second instruction had us passing a Highway 401 on ramp, followed by a turn onto the next on ramp – which could only be achieved if we turned left. What an auspicious beginning! The distance to the odometer check was very long – at 25 kms – so Gary had lots of time to work ahead on interpreting the instructions in Sections 2 and 3. This would serve us well throughout the rally, as he always had free time to keep working ahead.
Shortly into Section 2 we came across the first checkpoint and believed that we must have zeroed it, since our timing and average speeds were spot on. But when I looked at the distance and elapsed time on the sticker, it appeared that we were a little over a minute late. This puzzled me for the balance of the rally, as I couldn’t imagine how that could have happened. As it turned out, the scoring contained an error, which resulted in all teams being penalized at that checkpoint, to varying degrees. I think they should have eliminated all the penalties in the final scoring, but I suspect it wouldn’t have changed the rankings for anyone – certainly not for us.
I am a little fuzzy on the details of which instruction set applied to each of the remaining Sections. However, there was quite a variety, including: simple distance to turns, straightforward tulip diagrams, a line map and accompanying table of speed changes, instructions using a clock face (in by the hour hand, out by the minute hand), a five column table covering Left, Right, Straight, Stop and Average Speed, and a unique set of tulips using a legend of different standard configurations combined with a key identifying the “In” and “Exit” road numbers. The Expert and Intermediate instructions were even more complicated, requiring the use of protractors, rulers and other special techniques. All of these teams struggled to stay on route and on time, using their maximum allotment of Time Allowances. There a lot of changes to average speed, so it was more important than ever to stay close to, but just above, the target speed. I was careful to keep some speed in the bank, so to speak, since you lose about 3 km/h on an average of 72 km/h just by stopping and making a turn.
Before we reached the halfway point, the car started to misbehave when we left a checkpoint. It would stumble and hesitate under full acceleration, and the condition worsened the farther we went. This had happened to a very small degree at our previous event, but had cleared itself shortly. On this day, it just kept getting worse, to the point that I could accelerate only at half throttle or less. There were many long stretches where the target average speed was 72 km/h and it took well over a kilometre to reach that speed. Fortunately, we were able to do so most of the time, in spite of the sluggish performance, and we were able to compensate in subsequent sections by exceeding the target speeds and calculating estimated times of arrival. At one checkpoint I asked for three extra minutes in our out time, so I could try to find the source of the problem. I discovered that the throttle cable had jumped out of its guide, resulting in random amounts of throttle being applied when the pedal was depressed. I fixed this and the car ran better for a while, but the problem returned and the cable wasn’t the problem. By the time we finished the rally in Brantford, the engine was stalling at every stop light and in the heavy traffic we encountered while driving past the town fair parking area. I need to perform some tests of the fuel injectors, throttle position sensor and maybe other things to find the cause and repair this problem.
Despite the car troubles, we felt that we had done extremely well, since were able to track our progress at each checkpoint. We only took one Time Allowance – for 2.5 minutes – as a result of missing a turn in the map section; and it was very close to the amount of delay that we’d incurred. We finished with a total score of 2.3 penalty points, including 1.1 for the error in the first checkpoint scoring. That turned out to be the lowest score of all classes in the rally and, of course, lowest in Novice. So we earned our first ORRC (or MCO) victory and got the big trophy for this event, which has been awarded since 1983. We received congratulations from many of our friends and saw several of them along the highway on the way home, honking and waving every time. Tired but happy, we got back to my house around midnight, still pumped from our successful day. We now have about ten weeks until the next event, which should be more than enough to repair the engine problem and the leaking fuel filler and even do some body work. I believe we’re still in second place in the provincial standings and it will be a close race with our friends in the Triumph right through until year-end.
Videos are available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bohXJATiIEs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZjjVOKD7fQ
Photographs from Legendary Motor Cars are filed at
http://s229.photobucket.com/albums/ee234/kilrwail/Legendary%20Motor%20Cars%20-%205%20June%202010/