Countdown to Headwaters

It's less than three weeks to go to the Headwaters Regional Rally out of Walker, MN. Time to start getting ready.
Now don't go thinking that we started getting ready with the event just three weeks away. There's been preparations going on for a while. Schedules to plan out to get two cars, drivers, and crews up to Northern Minnesota, (as well as a third race car to the Brainerd International Raceway for a World Racing League event). There's spare parts to order, for example. The most technical sounding thing was producing some .kml files so Dan could do some tortuosity calculations.
As co-driver I've spent a lot of time plundering Youtube for video recce footage of the stages that we will be using. The roads have been used previously on the Ojibwe Forests Rally and I found some good video from 2010 that has helped in getting the feel for the stages. I even went as far as making my own stage notes from the footage.

A page of my own stage notes.

But last weekend it was time to get the car (hereinafter referred to as "The #958") into the infamous "Third Stall" of the garage that the racing team is named for and do some work on her.
When I arrived at our "top secret facility" The #958 was sat in the driveway waiting to be cleaned and polished. However, my first task was to get my "office" sorted out. My plan is to have a good rally computer set up on my iPad mini to get us through the event. I've got ASE RallyCom by ARC a Japanese developer. I needed to get it situated on the RAM mount so I could see it and not have it obstruct my view of the road ahead. Right now, it looks like a lot of information on there for me to absorb, and probably does to the uninitiated too. There's clocks, countdowns, odometers and all kinds of stuff on there.

Lots of information.

Once I had got my situation sorted out and The #958 was cleaned, it was time to do real car work. There were the front struts to replace and the tyres to change for a start. The struts had collapsed at an autocross the weekend after Nemadji. We were lucky that they hadn't collapsed at the rally itself. We would have both been very disappointed if we hadn't finished. Anyway, replacing the struts was simplicity itself. Wheel off, remove old strut, put new one in and the wheel back on. It was when I was putting a wheel back on that I got a real shock. A wheel with a snow tyre on is quite light, however, a wheel with a gravel tyre on isn't. It's heavier. A lot heavier. I got one heck of a surprise when I tried to lift the wheel onto the lugs... Cue an explanation from Dan about the thickness of the sidewall of a snow tyre as opposed to a gravel tyre. Snow tyres have thinner sidewalls so they can flex more, that's how they get grip in the icy conditions. A gravel tyre gets its grip from the tread, and doesn't need to flex. So the sidewall is thicker. Even a regular road tyre has a thicker sidewall than a snow tyre. I'm learning something new all the time.

Working on The #958, installing new struts, changing tyres.

After having a dinner break, we headed back out to our trusty steed to finish off. Our task was to see if we could get the electric window winder to work on my door. It quit during Nemadji. It wasn't the motor as the window could be operated from the driver side. It must be the switch. There was much testing of terminals, fuses, and wires before it was decided that somehow the wrong switch was installed. How it even worked at all was a mystery to Dan. He concocted a clever wiring solution that got the window working from my seat. A quick squirt of everything with WD40 to get the old winder motor running smoothly and we were good to go.
Or were we?
As we were about to put the door panel back on, I tried the switch again.
Nothing. The window didn't move.
More puzzled expressions. Had I loosened some wires when I was fiddling around spraying the WD40? Or had the motor simply just died? An expiring motor seems the most logical choice as it was sounded like it was struggling beforehand. That's why we got the WD40 and some silicon spray out, to ease things. So that's where we left it. The window didn't work before we started and it didn't work when we finished. One possible solution suggested was something along the lines of this window opening system on this 1940's railway carriage. I don't think that it will come to that, and it's probably illegal anyway. I can easily open and close the door to get the timing sheet like I did before. Right now The #958 is on four wheels and runs we are ready to rally which is where we want to be.