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.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Breaking (down) Bad

Saturday February 27th was the day of the Lucas Flamethrower rally, one of the longest running, if not the longest running road rallies in Minnesota. Set on the gravel roads around the Mississippi River city of Red Wing, this is prime road rally country. We had volunteered on this one before and decided that this time we'd like to run it. Winter tyres are pretty much a prerequisite for this event, given the time of year and the type of roads. But this winter has been unseasonably warm, so we figured that Winter tyres were not as important. Sixty degree temps are a sure fire way to accelerate the wear on your winter tyres. So we felt good about running on all seasons.
It was not to be a good day.
We hadn't run in a rally of any sort since last summers Coolee Classic, so we were feeling like novices all over again. But as I now also occupy the co-drivers seat in a stage rally car I was looking forward to getting some practice reading Tulip instructions and using some new rally computer software I had ready for our next stage rally.
Our Rallymaster turned up a bit late so instead of having 45 minutes to an hour to review the instructions we had about 35 to 40 minutes.
This Rally was a Monte Carlo style rally and we had to calculate our average speed from the instructions so that we could know when to arrive at the timing control. I have trouble doing mathematical calculations of any sort at the best of times, (I suspect that I may have some form of dyscalculia) and having to do them in less time than expected was something of a stressor and we headed out on the Odometer check with only half of the calculations done, the generals only partly read, and without the ARM Rally Computer programmed, so I set up RallyTripMeter instead, which is a much easier program to use. Something that helped to calm me down and we went through the odo check with no problems. It felt good to be reading Tulips and following the instructions. We were feeling very good as we waited at the start of the first leg.
We headed away, rounded the first corner and headed to the second, an easy right hander.
"Woah." Said Lorrie in the drivers seat. We slid into the second corner just a bit, and the fifth, sixth... and others as we headed up the hill, some because the road was muddy, some because in the sheltered corners there was still ice there. We climbed to the top of the hill and the roads dried out. So much so, that in places the cars were kicking up dust. We headed down into another valley and the roads got wetter and icier and slippy again. It was somewhere along here that I started to have some kind of panic attack. It started out just be getting plain nervous as we approached corners. This was relatively easy to cope with, my heart rate was getting elevated and I'd squirm in my seat a bit as we went around the corners. This was just some adrenalin kicking in I thought, it'll pass. I could live with this.
We were passed by the car running behind us, so we knew we weren't pushing things and consequently we came into the first control approaching 3 minutes off the pace.
We set off on the second leg running out of order, which had its advantages. We followed (at a safe distance) two cars in front of us. The ease with which both the cars navigated the twists and turns in the road showed that we had little to fear from the conditions and we ended up coming into the second control only a few seconds late. I was definitely still "on edge", but we were back running where we should have been.
I was beginning to feel like I could cope as we started the third leg. But that didn't last very long as we didn't have the experts in front to assure us I started to descend into panic.
I started to feel every little slip and slide, perhaps I was even feeling some that weren't there.
I started feeling like every speed we were doing was too fast, every time Lorrie braked I felt the brakes wouldn't stop us. It was as if were were driving on sheet ice on slick tyres, no matter what surface we were on. The fact that the car did slow, and we did make it around the corners with no problem was doubly confusing. I fought it for a while.
"I can get through this, the roads look fine. I'm just imagining things. We've driven on far worse roads with no problems."
Then the really irrational thoughts started.
"What happens when we slide off the road and down that hill and crash the car? It's OK in the Rally Car it's built to deal with crashes. This is just our car. We won't be able to get to work on Monday."
I remember how many of my thoughts centered on how Blue the car is.
"I don't want us to crash our Blue car."
It wasn't just having an accident in the car. It was having an accident in the Blue car. I became obsessed with the Blue car.
It was getting towards dark and our headlights started to become noticeable as they swept across the landscape in front of us.
I still believed that I could get through this, but as we crested a rise and rounded a corner the headlights illuminated a point maybe 50 yards ahead of us, yet it seemed it to me like there was nothing directly in front but a black void. I knew we had to stop. Before things got really bad.
I couldn't process what I was seeing, I couldn't tell left from right looking at the route instructions. We pulled over and put the hazard warning lights on. With the stimuli of watching the road and reading the instructions gone I could begin to calm myself down and rein in everything. A couple of vehicles checked on us by the side of the road. Everything was relatively fine. I had stopped before things really escalated. Admittedly it probably wasn't much before that moment, tut having taken time to calm down, and waited for the sweep car to pass and report our pulling out of the event, we could set the GPS to the hotel and head back. It was a good job that the GPS was handling things as once we started off, things started to come back. The not believing the car would stop, not being able to tell left from right. It was a long painful 10 miles or so back to the sanctuary of our room.
It can take several hours for a panic attack to subside so things weren't over when I got into the room.  I'd crawl up in a ball, pace around the room endlessly, try to sleep. Listen to some music or read to try and take my mind off things as well as running through some of the breathing and grounding exercises that I have used before. After a couple of hours in the room I felt like I might be able to make it to the end point to meet up with the other competitors. Conversation would surely help take my mind off things I thought, and it did. Everyone has fun stories to share of this or their previous events and hearing all those and all the laughter helped take my mind off things. People had even run off the road and had to be rescued by the sweep car, and they were fine.
Everyone had had a good time. The little sections of route that we saw were great, there was a couple of EPIC dips in the road on leg 3 that I recall vividly, almost fondly. I'd like to run the route in the summer when we wouldn't have to worry about ice and other adverse conditions. Ed Solstad puts on a great rally on these roads, and I expect we will return in the future.
It would be a very easy cop out to say that if we'd had winter tyres on our car then this wouldn't have happened. But that's not true. We don't know. That was just the final trigger. There are a lot of things going on in our daily lives that stress us and we don't realize. I myself will loose my job of 14 years at the end of March, and though I feel pretty good abut getting a new position somewhere else pretty quickly, work can be a constant source of stressful situations.
The fact that I didn't have time to do all the pre-rally calculations, that was a stressor. That I couldn't set up the rally computer as I wanted to another one, stressors were coming pretty rapidly that Saturday afternoon.
We could have had a close call with a deer and that could have set me off. Winter tyres would have made no difference there. Deer strikes have occurred on this event several times in the past, and as a matter of fact as we were on our slow, painful journey back to the hotel we did encounter a pair of deer crossing the road in front of us.
Why am I even posting this? It's hardly rally talk and probably isn't helping my recovery, as I still feel a little disjointed, calling up all the memories. The little detail of obsessing about the blue car, I didn't realize that until I started to think about it as I was writing this. Perhaps someone will understand this, share the story around and someone who needs it will read it and take something from it.
That'll be fine by me.