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.

Monday’s first two stages were called on account of road construction.

The work wasn’t on the route proper, but the dump trucks servicing the work would have been barred by closing the road (and there were a steady stream of the trucks). Methinks the town council weighed the relative benefits to the community, chose pavement over entertainment, and revoked permission.

So we opened with Colliers, run twice, blasting through the woods on a ten-foot trail then bursting out to fly along the waterside road in a village. They’d built two chicanes in to manage the fast cars’ velocity. One chicane peeled off the main road through a church parking lot pockmarked with mostly-marked bumps. The second inserted two short concrete bridges twenty feet and ninety degrees apart. Between the bridges, a pothole — large enough to get its own mention in the route book — took a victim, ripping the right front wheel from a BRZ.

Roads so narrow are easily blocked, but luckily the BRZ was running last. Unluckily, the plan was to go through again. And for some reason we Grand Touring cars were released, and we must have all come upon the warning triangle, the car with wheel askew, and the chagrined crew member holding the ‘OK’ sign. The 30 or so ‘Targa’ cars had to scrub the stage… (those folks are less disciplined than the GT crowd).

We moved on, to an pair of stages in mirror image. The first shot down a tapering valley, over some sideways hillocks, and petered out, as the valley became an inlet with steep rock shores. Stop or get wet, that’s the choice there.

We pivoted as a long chain of cars and lined up for the return. The outgoing route notes had “CAUTION crest into medium right downhill. Don’t cut” a couple km in. The first car on the road, a fully prepped Subaru, had some problem with that turn and wound up off to the inside. No one hurt, but the crew’s management of the situation seemed not to be practiced, and the confusion (plus concern, always, for safety) scratched another stage.  In reflection, it’s probably good that the driver/co-driver aren’t “used to crashing”, eh?

Day -2: The six ay-yem alarm shattered our rest period. After staggering through the shower, we threw some stuff in the car – and the car wakes up much better than we had, starting instantly and barking its bark. We headed up the peninsula for Flatrock and the rally school.

Picturesque? Yah. We might get used to the scenery after a week, but at this point it’s stupefying. “Flat Rock” sounds like an unimaginative name for a town, ’til you see the slab of rock they’re talking about. Then you’re impressed they could put any words to it.

And these towns have been around a while… some places settled in the sixteenth century? Okay, I can see that. The accents are an oddments mix of Scots, Irish, West Country England, and I-don’t-know-what. Arr they nice? Shurr. Are they law-abidin’? Shurr, mostd’ time.

The rally school taught one key lesson: drive in the center of the road. The shoulders are worn away, rough and ragged, and tire hazards are everywhere. We went through two practice stages at low speeds. On the second, we missed two turns by misunderstanding the route book. Hopefully the turns will be clearer when all the taping and marking is done.

Day -1: Technical inspection, held in a hockey arena with its ice covered by heavy plastic tiles, took awhile. Even the relatively mild regulations controlling our equipment bear interpreting, and some negotiation and discussion with the inspectors. The Targa cars, many of which are heavily customized, drew the largest share of the inspectors’ attention, so we weren’t done ’til 4 p.m.

Then a slight surprise: for the benefit of publicity and event promotion, the organizers had set a ‘car show’ for the public running ’til 9 p.m.  Following that surprise, another: the cars were then to stay overnight in the arena. Hmm. Our hotel is 15km away. We negotiated an escape, based on the “normalness” of our station wagon, and drove ourselves and our teammates back to the Holiday Inn and bed. Our teammates’ car was too interesting to be paroled.

Day 0: Preview/Prologue stages. The four of us were early awake, out to the arena, through the breathalyzer line, and then… in a meeting. Something about safety. And another meeting. Something about speeding outside the stages. And almost another meeting, but instead a general rush for the exit. 40 cars, many barely street legal, trotting up the Torbay Road at the 50 k.p.h. limit toward the first stage start.

Four runs total today, two each of the two practice stages, which helpfully were the same we’d run at legal speeds two days before.  There were hundreds of spectators along the stages, in little cliques near their homes or in moderate crowds near corners that promised excitement.

We missed no turns today. And we were mostly in the center of the road.

There were some clock issues both on the organizers’ side and on ours, so we’re not positive we’re perfectly on pace – but no penalty points are given today, so ehhh.

Tomorrow, the seconds count.

They’re everywhere!

Day -5:  Airline travel can go so wrong. Parking the car at PDX, our carrier’s auto-texting system notified us our flight would be late. The buzz-buzz of similar texts arriving grew so familiar that, by the following morning, I no longer detected new ones. They were just part of the background.

Day -4: started off rocky with more flight delays, but smoothed out as soon as we landed in Portland, ME.  Our checked bags were already there since they fit on the last flight the previous night (we couldn’t get on that plane).  Then our car showed up promptly, with 3200 miles worth of bugs on front, and we peeled out for the ferry dock, 700+ miles away. We had two GPSs on the dash, one garden variety unit and one Special Commercial Vehicle Tracking and Dispatch System from Renee’s work. The two GPSs disagreed about whether we’d make the ferry at 23:45 that night. I was optimistic, ’til we were cresting some mountain pass in Nova Scotia and a wall of fog clamped visibility to nada. Can’t haul ashes if you can’t see.  But the wall was thin, and as the night came on, the traffic was thin, too. 300km of wet, dark, unknown roads to cover on a deadline.  How dreadful.  🙂

We made the ferry.   Not our original boat, of course – the airline snafus had put us six hours late for that – but there was another, smaller ship queued for the late sailing. A possible problem lurked with the change-of-schedule. These are long runs, 7hrs on the short route and 14hrs on the long, and vessels are serious seagoing stuff. You don’t “just show up” at the dock, you must have a “booking”. And we didn’t. What we had was a missed prior ferry booking, and hope.

Top marks to Marine Atlantic. They bent the language of the contract and let us aboard. We chomped on nachos and fell to sleep in the cabin they granted us.

Day -3: Off the boat and rolling, a mere 921km driving miles to St. Johns, following the main road all along the top of the island. No problem except exhaustion, but we swapped drivers often and got to the city by 5:25 p.m.

Note that Newfoundland has its own time zone, one that’s offset a half-an-hour from those in the U.S.   When it’s 8 a.m. in Portland, Oregon, it’s 11 a.m. in Portland, Maine, then noon in New Brunswick, and finally 12:30 p.m. in Newfoundland.

No moose sightings yet.

More agonizing airport antics this morning, then, when we arrived in Portland, Maine — all lights went green. Our lost duffles appeared,and then a bug-fronted red car pulled up at the curb. A few words of gratitude and we split for the ferry. Rollin’

Still on the ground at PDX. I promise I am not the cause for the delay; I’m on my best behavior.
But this does threaten to scramble the next few steps on our trip – and the ferry tomorrow won’t wait.

Some stages are out in the wilds, on sweeping asphalt surrounded by compact pines. And some stages are downtown.