Here in my car I feel safest of all...

Gary Numan, and it fits in perfectly with todays post.
The Nemadji trail Rally is less than a week away. I've spent my time busying myself learning how to read course notes and Dan has been working hard preparing the car.
I've been measured up to fit in the seat, yet I haven't actually sat in the seat while the car has been moving.
Until today, that is.
Today was shakedown day.
The chance to see if everything was working after the fitting of the limited slip differential, and more importantly, how I was going to cope with a car driving at speed on a gravel road.
But there were some other tasks to sort out before we could get out there. Principally the installation of the in car camera, after all, you all want to see how I cope out there don't you?
In car camera is actually a requirement on a national rally, not so at a regional level. But it's easy to see how invaluable they are to any crew, enabling them to see how well they work together; the co-driver calling the route and the driver following the instructions. After throwing some off the wall ideas out there that at one point involved a live stream we settled for a GoPro mounted behind the crew, like everyone else.
The other task was to adjust my safety harness.
But let's just stop there a moment and take a step back. To put the safety harness on you first have to get in the car.
You open the door and...

The door bar of the roll cage impedes my entry.

There's a bloody great big Red bar in the way! The door bar of the roll cage. All of a sudden a task you don't have to think about becomes difficult. Left foot first? Right foot first? The first time I got in the car I had no idea what to do. After a couple of visits to the car, getting in and out isn't that much of a problem anymore.
When you're only used to regular seat belts (or in the case of my Studebaker, lap belts) a six-point harness is a horse of a very different colour.  But after 20 minutes or so of loosening and tightening the straps in various combinations. I ended up tightly, but comfortably held in the seat.

Yours truly, well and truly strapped in.

It is a very different sensation being restrained by a six-point harness. You'd better make sure that anything you need is within arms length, because you can't lean forward to reach anything.
Now at last, the next task was to fire up the car and get out there.
For me, there wasn't any feeling of claustrophobia strapped into the seat surrounded by a heavy roll cage in a stripped out car interior devoid of carpets, stereos and other such luxuries you take for granted these days. Inside it was pretty noisy when we were accelerating and the experience did leave me with something of a pounding headache, but I'm assured that with crash helmets on during the event this background noise will barely be noticeable.
Driving on gravel roads and other loose surfaces, even after nearly 20 years in this country still makes me nervous. They are not something we have in England. So I'm always happy to turn those duties over to someone else. Some snowfalls in the days previous meant that there were slippery patches in the shaded parts of the roads, which would make me double nervous if I was at the wheel but Dan clearly knew what he was doing driving on gravel roads in these conditions and I felt very at ease with him in the driving seat. I once glanced up at the speedometer to see we were traveling at... let's just say we were going at a speed considerably faster than I'd ever consider driving on such a surface and I wasn't bothered. So I clearly trust him at the wheel of the car. Now all I have to do is get him to trust my instructions. That might take a while.

Car#958 after its shakedown run.

The next time I'll be in the car is but 6 days away as I write this. 
I'll be counting down. "5-4-3-2-1. Go. Three hundred. Right four tightens..."

We could jam in Joe's garage...

It's Dan's garage and we're working on the rally car not jammin' on a Stratocaster with a whammy bar. But it's my blog and I've already established a musical theme to the blog entries and I'll post whatever I jolly well like (besides, Joe's Garage is one of my all time favorite albums).
Being that this is amateur motorsport and in many cases the driver works on his car with help from friends, I figured I should offer to help, even though my automotive repair abilities are somewhat lacking. The day before I had been doing an oil change on my 1976 MGB and had drained the oil from the gearbox and refilled the sump and wondered why the oil level was ridiculously high before I realized my mistake.
So not exactly brimming with confidence after that episode I went round to Dans garage to see how I could make myself useful.
For those of you looking for a picture of car #958 here is the sight that greeted me that morning.

The car, ready to be worked on.

Up on jacks, wheels off, gearbox removed, all in preparation to fit a limited slip differential. The seat had also been removed ready for the task of lowering it so that I could sit in the car without banging my head on the roll cage.
I asked Dan how I could make myself useful.
"Well, I need to work on lowering your seat and fabricating the fixing bracket, you can break down the gearbox if you like."
"Break down the gear box? You do know what I did yesterday don't you?" I said, referring to my oil change escapades.
Dan laughed. "We have a full set of illustrated instructions, besides you know as much about dismantling a Mazda gearbox as I do. That's why we have the instructions."
The instructions seemed pretty easy to follow, so I donned my overalls and with a set of spanners and sockets, I set to undoing the myriad bolts on the gearbox casing. In the meantime sounds of cutting, grinding, and welding came from the other side of the garage.
A couple of times I would stop and be called over to test fit the seat but the gearbox breakdown was mostly a piece of cake and when the casing was finally removed all you can say is that it was a thing of beauty. Dan came over and studied it deeply.

A mechanical marvel.

With the gearbox opened and the counter shaft removed that was as good a place as any to stop for lunch, about three hours had flown by.
During the mornings work the mail had arrived with a package and a task for me that was special on a couple of levels.
I'd get to apply the names and flags.
My name and flag.
To me that was pretty serious.
You see, rally cars all over the world have the driver and co-driver names on them complete with a national flag. It's in the WRC and Rally America regulations. The WRC regulations (rule 19.1) state that the flag has to be the flag of your passport. The Rally America regulations (article 3.1 subsection B, number 2b) allow for competitors to display their state/home region flag alongside their name. 
My original decision had been to go with the flag of St. George against my name, but then when I saw Dan had the flag of Minnesota against his name on the car I thought it would be extremely neat to have the flag of my home county of Lincolnshire on there. So I read the rule book, it might cause a second look or two. But the flag of Lincolnshire would be legal.
On another level, I've spent about 16 years working in sign shops in England and America, and applying vinyl lettering was an everyday task so I was looking forward to seeing if I still had the technique.

I remembered how to apply vinyl lettering.

The co-drivers side. Things just became very, very real.

With the names on the car, the reality of what I'm going to do set in, I can sit in front of my computer going over course notes as much as I like, but there is an air of permanence when you see names on the side of things. Everyone can see that. I was a little speechless.
That was as good a place as any to stop the days work. The limited slip differential hadn't returned from the workshop, so that couldn't be fitted. We had done about as much as we could do for the day.
I had felt extremely useful and hadn't broken anything or spilled any fluids all over the garage floor, So that was a win. We had a car that I could sit in and had my name on the side, it had been a very good day.

(Hopefully not on a) Road to nowhere

I'll wager David Byrne and Talking Heads would be surprised to find their songs associated with a persons quest to be a stage rally co-driver.

Hopefully come December 5th I'll be good at my job and car #958 won't end up lost in a forest on a road to nowhere.
Our visit to the Little's was twofold. Firstly, as we've discussed, was to see how I would fit in the car. Secondly, was to get some co-driver instruction from Dan's wife, Susi.
Susi is an experienced co-driver herself, navigating for another local driver Paul Johansen, who had also joined us all for the evening to contribute extra sound advice from a drivers point of view. Susi had agreed to give me some pointers as to what a co-drivers job entails. This was an enlightenment in itself. 

If you think that a co-drivers job is just to sit in the seat and call the turns, you'd be very wrong. In a big pro team that might be the case. But on a small regional rally team, that could barely scratch the surface of the co-drivers tasks. It's probably more accurate to say that all the driver does is turn up and drive.
Everything from booking hotels, and supervising the submitting of entries, to making sure all the tools are packed and in the right place. All could fall under the perview of the co-driver. If Dan says he's going to order a "woofle sprocket for the hyperdrive" then it's my job to keep at him until said mysterious part is delivered, and that's the easy stuff.

On the day of the event a co-driver can be everything from Team manager to minder/babysitter for the driver.
Who is responsible for all the paperwork at registration?

The co-driver.

The car will have to go though the technical inspection. Who's going to make sure it gets there?

The co-driver.

Who's going to make sure the support crew knows how to get to the service point to work on the car in the service break?

The co-driver.

Who is going to make sure the driver goes to the bathroom?

NO.
Once I'd got over the shock of all that, it was on to the things that I knew about. Reading the course notes.
"Right four tightens, fifty, Left four over crest". If you've ever watched any Rally cockpit videos on YouTube or seen James Mays efforts in a Bentley on Top Gear. You'll know what it's about.
Quite why it's this element of the sport that interests me so I don't know. I think when I was first interested in the co-driving as a kid, the co-driver was more often referred to as the navigator, perhaps I thought there was a lot of map reading involved and I love looking at and reading maps. Once the truth was discovered I was certainly no less interested in the role.

I had become fairly conversant in the terms used in the course notes. I knew what "Left four tightens over crest" meant. So I was feeling pretty confident about this. But hold on there! Reading notes off a sheet of paper is one thing, relating those to what is happening on the road in front of you is another. That actual experience is going to have to wait until the day of the event, in the meantime Susi said that I should try reading course notes along with one of the many videos on YouTube.

Course notes for SS1 of the Ojibwe Forests Rally and Nick Roberts and Rhainnon Gelsomino cockpit video

Perhaps you think this would be easier than the real thing. But I think you'd be very much mistaken. Watching a cockpit video on a computer screen in two dimensions is different to the real world. Thirty yards can look a lot like fifty, it's difficult to make out a crest on the road on the screen. So a R4/Cr 30 can look a lot like a R4 50. There's no feedback from a rough road, you're not lurching around any corners feeling G-forces, you're sat in a comfy chair sipping a cup of tea. If you're not concentrating very hard you can easily get lost on the course notes. I've already spent many hours over the afternoons and evenings reading along with the road, struggling with it. I would quite literally blink and loose my place.
Then all of a sudden it clicked. I thought it was like learning lines for a play where the instructions and the turns became memorized. I thought that made sense. I started out by learning on a 2012 Nemadji trail Rally Stage 1 video which after nearly 20 viewings I had become familiar with. But then I tried following the corresponding stage 2 video which I ran all the way through the first time of watching having not seen it before. At all. So something was beginning to work somewhere along the line.
There we are then. I now know that there's much more to being a co-driver than I originally thought. A whole world I wasn't expecting when I signed up for this adventure. A world that should "the interview at Nemadji" be successful will present me with a whole new set of challenges.
I know what you're thinking.
"He's got this far and he's barely mentioned the car. When do we get to see the car?" That is all part of the plan and will wait for another entry.

You may say to yourself... My god! What Have I done?

"Hmm..." Muttered Dan Little, driver of the #958 Mazda MX-3 Rally car. "You'll be banging your head against the roll cage here...and there. Not unusual. The seat needs to come down about an inch, inch and a half that's all. I can cut a hole in the floor, drop the mountings and weld everything back up. No problem."
It's a Friday night and I'm actually being fitted to the co-drivers seat of a stage rally car.
In the immortal words of David Byrne and Talking Heads. "How did I get here?"
Well, about a month ago I received a Facebook message from fellow TCRC member and stage rally driver, Dan Little.

"So, having volunteered at Ojibwe, do you have any interest in co-driving in a stage rally?"
(I'm sure he had probably forgotten that a couple of times I've mentioned my dream of being a co-driver of a stage rally car in this blog.)
To me, this was not an opportunity to be missed. I looked on it as some kind of reward, a treat if you like, for the blog post on volunteering at Ojibwe. That post is now the most popular one on this blog, and very well received by the rally community in Minnesota. I never got invited back to the Goodwood Revival when that post was the most popular, so I thought this was Karma evening itself out.

We arranged a meeting and over some proper English cider and fish 'n' chips he explained the situation. He wasn't just looking for a co-driver for the upcoming rally but for the foreseeable future.
So, I could look on this as a "job interview". If I can cope, If Dan thinks I can cope, and we work well together, then the seat could very probably be mine.

Oh my giddy goodness.

Things very quickly took a whole new turn (L3/Cr, left three over crest in rally parlance). Getting the chance to experience something you dream of is one thing, to have the potential of turning that into something more permanent is a different kettle of fish altogether.

The first thing I had to do was get myself a Rally America co-drivers license. A task that is as simple as it says. Just fill in the form online, answer a medical questionnaire, send them some money and Bob's your Uncle! You are licensed. (Actually, the person in charge of licensing at Rally America is called Bob, but he's not my Uncle. That would be too much of a co-incidence).
With that, our entry into the Nemadji Trail Rally could become official.

There it is. All official as of Nov. 1st. Dan Little and Ian Holmes in Car #958.

As you can guess from the first lines of this post, we are a little way along from the official entry acceptance, but to cover everything would result in a huge unwieldy blog post, the very simple act of something as basic as actually getting into the car is worthy of mention. So you can be sure I'll be sharing more experiences in other blog posts as things develop and race day nears.