The 996 has twin forward-mounted radiators, one each side. They’re hung in the bodywork just front of the front wheels, at an angle, with large ducts funneling air to ’em. Internet rumors said they pickup a good amount of debris over time, so I thought I’d better check & maybe clean them.

Internet rumors are right.

The only constant is change.

All our equipment was slightly different this time. Same model car, but twice as much power. Same brand of tires, but a different size. Same rally computer, but different sensors and magnets. The results were … different, too.    Normally a team is warming up on Saturday, and their scores are better on Sunday.  Didn’t work that way for us; we fell from a close second place Saturday night to a distant fourth place at the end of the rally.  Boo!

 

Some nice photos, though.  🙂

Here’s our ride, the Bad Dog.

 

The cars line up at the start of a typical section. The surface here wasn’t bad – you couldn’t walk on it without slipping, but studded tires bit well.

Super-dark out in the woods Saturday night, somewhere NE of Carmi.

I ordered a large skid plate.

Roundel is the magazine of the BMW Car Club of America. We’re longtime subscribers.

I enjoy dreaming through the classified ads, learning from the columnists, and laughing in the ‘Letters’ section. I’m not the only one who dislikes ‘run-flat’ tires.

 

And in the December issue, there’s this:

The author got it mostly right…

GS in the parking garage has every little aftermarket guard you can imagine.

Guard on the sidestand switch.

Guard on the Telelever

Guard on the injector above the guard for the thottle plate pivot.

Keyed guard for the extra windshield.

Waiting on the beach(?) for the start of Keels, there was a wee bit o’ wind coming in the harbor.

 

The rally is a series of 40+ closed-road stages linked by transits on public roads.

The stages, together, add to around 400 km.

On those 400 km, I spent more than 50% of the time with the throttle wide open.

Wondering what the BMW’s on-board computer will say to the next service technician that reads it…

 

The two critical pieces of equipment were our intercoms (courtesy of LegitScript) and the supersize brakes on the car (from Roundel).

 

Uh-oh – the bunny caught me. This might be a stage where I still respected the ‘not-to-exceed’ limit.  Simon & Stewart were in the VW. Fabulous folks, fast and funny and indominable.

 

I believe all photo credits are: Ralph Saulnier.  I’ll be licensing several of his shots for memorabilia.

 

 

Standing on the headland at the mouth of Little Catalina Bay, heather and lichens underfoot clinging to mammoth lodes of shale, the rock crazily tilted off level and edges shredding away looking like blown-down straw.

The wind has eased, and it carries the sound of the GT40 over from town, 2 km away, as the Ford hurtles along the sea road. You see the blue splash gain speed, then the howl of the Gurney-Westlake V8’s open intake stacks follows in a few seconds.

29 turns in five kilometers. Starts at Cemetery Hill and winds down to the waterfront. Along avenues, alleys, and paths, passing picket fences and garden sheds almost close enough to touch. “Hard left into hard right into severe right then CAUTION steep downhill left at tee – don’t cut”, the turns come as fast as your co-driver can call ’em out.

We ran it twice. Second time around, the pavement was covered with black tracks laid down by the Targa cars; and there were hundreds of townspeople watching, cheering the circus.

We’ve had a couple of long stages so far, 14 – 24 kms.  If you consider the logistics of closed-road rallying, you’ll see that such a stage will be run fairly fast — otherwise, the length of time that locals will be locked out of the road is intolerable.  So we’ve run a couple of long fast stages so far.  And they’re not going well.

My usual method for running on time in touring rallies is to reach ‘on-time’ state early, and then try to minimize speed changes. This has us taking corners rather harder than normal, and running straights rather slower than normal. I tried that on the first long/fast stage yesterday. It was rubbish. The road was wet, hilly, and winding, and the average speed was brisk. It took 2 km just to reach the ‘on-time’ state, and holding it via the technique described above was flat scary.

So, adjusting, I reverted to a late, heavy braking + hearty acceleration strategy. It worked fine on the final stage last night, feeling much better. That stage was mostly downhill, though, and I found new limits today.

AssignedSpeed (CAST): 110 kph.    MaxSpeed (not to exceed):   130 kph.

That’s a pretty small over-cast window… if you brake for curves, and then accelerate to max speed, the time error display crawls….. back …. toward…. perfect. In fact, with the start leading to a steep twisting uphill section, I was going further behind right away. I knew the BMW would do 130+ in third, and so I stopped shifting. The curves could all be taken in third, and when the road straightened – I just took it to around 6,000 rpm and held it there.

But I never caught up, not in 24 km.  We crossed the line at least 12 down.

So what next?
I assume I need to carry more speed through the corners, but as yet I’m not ready to push harder in that direction.
They had a radar gun check station on a straight stretch, and there’s a $250 fine for busting the limit.  Despite that threat — with a closed road, after all — it may be time for fourth.

 

p.s.  The N52  jumps to 6k pretty quick, and it sounds great. But dang, does it drink fuel when you run like that.