About this site

My name is Ian Holmes. A few years ago I discovered the branch of motor sport known as road rally. Along with my wife, Lorrie, we road rally our 2014 Ford Focus in regular road rallies and my 1976 MGB in classic road rallies. In 2015 I took over the co-drivers seat for local rally driver Dan Little. This blog describes my adventures in all forms of rallying.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

DLBF is better than DNF

With the Summer Solstice rally temporarily delayed, Team Holmes Rallye were excited to be running  in the Coulee Classic out of Maiden Rock, WI. Even more so as were taking FG, our 1976 MGB roadster. We love the car, and even though it approaches its 40th birthday it runs perfectly. There had been a bit of work performed on the car just after we awoke him from his winters slumber this year. The brakes and emissions were worked on by my good friend Kurt Muller over at Clear Skies motoring, while I'd installed a new valve cover gasket and heater control valve. The car was going to get a good workout over the Coulee Roads of Wisconsin.
Saturday was forecast to be hot, very hot, so we actually drove down to the Rallye start point with the roof up it was surprisingly cool in the cockpit as the temperatures started to cruise through the 70's F. Even the drive down was not uneventful, we were overtaken by a Healey three litre in South Saint Paul.
The Healey passes us.

At one point on the way down I could see this Healey and one of the new Alfa Romeo 4C's on the road in front of me. Later on, a few miles down the road I looked in my mirror and saw an MGA and a Porsche Boxster behind me. Great sights that made me smile.
FGtheMGB just arrived at Maiden Rock.
The Coulee Classic always has a great entry field of collector cars and this year was no exception. Along with FG there was the MGA, a pair of Healeys, a Frog eye Sprite, an E-Type Jag convertible, Toyota MR2, Saab SPG, a Lotus Esprit turbo and no less than TWO Citroen 2 CV's. What a great and varied field. It was great to see so many cars. Ed Solstad, the rallymaster should be congratulated for getting such a varied field.
Front to back, MGA, Porsche Boxster, E-type Jag, Porsche

Jag. No more needs to be said

Saab SPG

I utterly adore this Frog eye Sprite
So to the Rallye. This was not one of our finest performances. Right from the start we had problems. The bright sunshine and heat played merry hell with our Garmin. It was almost impossible to see in the bright sunshine, and after a while it was a moot point as it got too hot and stopped working altogether, (we were not the only ones to have issues with electronics due to the heat.) to cut a long story short, in all the resulting confusion the navigator ended up misreading some instructions which meant we took a totally wrong turn and ended up 8 minutes late into the first control. The navigator felt terrible over this, and dare I say it I lost some trust in them for a while. I was a tad concerned over FG too as the brakes had started to smell a tad coming down some of the hills we had traversed earlier. Still, we managed to claw the time back and coming into to control four we were just six one hundredths of a minute early, if I'd dabbed that brake pedal just once more we may well have made a zero. Oh well, shoulda, coulda, woulda... By this point I was resigned to the fact that we would win the coveted" dead last but finished" award. 
At the rest break it became apparent that the heat was causing problems for some of our fellow competitors. The MGA was sounding very sick and was seen cooling down by the side of the road at one point, and Clarence Westberg was debating wether continue of head for home. Worse was to befall a Porsche Boxster. for according to an eyewitness report from one of the Healeys...
"We were following the Porsche up the hill when all of a sudden there was a huge white cloud of smoke and we couldn't see anything at all! When we emerged from the cloud we saw the Black Porsche with smoke billowing out of the rear."
When we arrived on the scene a few minutes later smoke was still rising from behind the drivers seat a crestfallen Tony Stamson waved to us that everything was OK, and we went on our way.
The rest of the Rallye was quite uneventful for us. We were reminded to keep our concentration up at all times. After passing one particularly complicated instruction we were feeling good, patting ourselves on the back, when we were bought sharply back to reality by a blast on a horn from a competitor behind us. We had missed another instruction just .11 mile along the road! we turned around as quickly as I could but that left us with another maximum score at the next control.
We will learn from our mistakes... One day.
Another thing we have to learn for these "Monte Carlo" style rallies is driving that last mile to come in on time. The accepted technique for a "Monte" is to drive to approx. one mile from the relevant control point, wait if necessary, and then drive in at about 30 mph to reach the control exactly on time. The experienced drivers can do this on auto pilot. We aren't that experienced and came in 40 and 60 one hundredths early when we tried. At least they weren't maximums.
The drive through Coulee Country was a joy. It was hard to feel bad about poor performance in such great countryside and we made it through to the end of the rally without any further mishaps.

The view from the finish. Gorgeous.
With that, we retired to the Nelson Stone Barn Pizza restaurant to add up scores and chat with all the other competitors. When the final scores were tallied my first thought was correct and we were winners of the coveted "dead last but finished" prize.
The DLBF award.
But it wasn't really all that bad. Though finishing well is nice, and winning better still. We had made it to the finish, unlike several others among us. It had been a great days drive and we had smiles on our faces as our 40 year old car purred its way home again.




No comments:

Post a Comment