I have an itch that can't be scratched.*

It seems so long ago, way back in December when I took part in my first stage rally in the co-drivers seat. It was a successful outing too, finishing third in class in worse than dicy conditions. I still look at that trophy with more pride than any other medals I've won for anything else.

Dan and I. Third in Class, first time out. Might be the proudest I've ever felt.

Then of course there was the coming down after the high of successful competition. I was warned about the Rally Hangover. The coming down from the adrenaline high of competition. 

"Yeah, right" I thought to myself.

But no. It's real, very real. If anything, I thought it might be similar to the feeling I'd felt after completing a successful run in a play on the Amateur stage, coming down after all the good newspaper reviews  and resounding rounds of applause from the audience. No. It was worse. A lot worse. I probably needed these.

(Not really a cure for Rally Hangover.)

Now a few more months have elapsed, I still look at that trophy and glow with pride, but the hangover has gone, replaced by the itch for competition. I'm chomping at the bit to be out there calling pace notes. I went out and bought myself a race suit. Put that down as one of the things I thought I'd never say. 

"I've bought myself a race suit".

No. I'm not a QuickFit fitter. The white stripe on their suits was vertical.

Then there's the friendship and camaraderie with my fellow competitors. I didn't know what to expect that first time. I thought the drivers might be a wild bunch of adrenaline junkies and the co-drivers might all be studious types stood in a seperate corner discussing Satre and Proust where I might have been able to talk about Senna and Prost. I was totally wrong on that one. I now interact with these people nearly every day wether it be sharing things on Facebook, or being invited to events as varied as motor race viewing parties or gourmet food and beer evenings. They are a great bunch of people. 

So, I've renewed my RallyAmerica license, and I'm ready to go. To the Headwaters Rally, I've paid the entry fee. 

It's in May. The end of May.

May is still long way away. 

I've been studying videos of other co-drivers to see how they do what they do, even listening in to them in foreign languages, hoping to pick up pointers. Dan and I have sat down and analysed our performance  and worked on how to call things in future. Things are looking good. I reckon we'll do better than third in class sometime this year. (I know, pride comes before a fall and all that.)

I'm sure that having made this brash prediction, many of my fellow competitiors won't let me forget it. 

*a reference to the Saturday Night Live "More Cowbell" sketch. Something I truly hate

Taking Note

I was skimming through the pages of the WRC website yesterday checking up on the progress of Rally Mexiko (their spelling not mine) and I came across this.

"Leading FIA World Rally Championship drivers have welcomed the inclusion of the 80KM (50 miles) Guanajuato stage at this years Rally Mexico.-

-The headline-grabbing gravel stage is the longest to be included in a WRC event for 30 years and contains 194 junctions as it meanders through the mountains to the north and east of host city Léon.

-it is anticipated to take around 50 minutes to get from the start to the finish. World champion co-driver Julien Ingrassia has 106 pages of hand-written pacenotes for this stage alone."

I had to sit there and let that sink in a little. 

Perhaps you should too.

Now I know I'm still a novice at this co-driving business, but that is a mind boggling amount. 

My first experience co-driving the notes ran for 2 1/2 pages of about 8 stage miles, and it took quite a bit of concentration to follow the notes for that short length of time. Now I know it's the co-drivers job, but to concentrate on your notes for the best part of an hour must be quite energy sapping. Not to mention the logistics of holding a 106 page book in your hands, turning the pages what amounts to every 30 seconds. What happens if as you turn a page, the car hits a bump knocks the book from your hands and you loose your page? 

Let's try and imagine what this is going to be like. Go and find a 100 page book, sit down on a dining room chair (tying yourself down to it tightly so you can barely move is optional as we're straying in 50 shades of Grey territory then) and try and read it out loud while someone is bouncing that chair up and down and from side to side. Score extra points if you also run your lawnmower to simulate engine noise and have a heater on high to recreate the Mexican heat.

So, much respect to every single co-driver out there on this marathon stage on Sunday morning. When the in-car footage becomes available on WRC+ I'll be spending several hours of my day watching carefully. I follow quite a few rally drivers and co-drivers on Twitter and Facebook and I'm for sure going to be checking them all to see if they post any pictures of this tome.

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.

Finding my way

Navigation. It's probably the most important part of Road Rally.

Sure, it takes some driving skill pull up at a timing control exactly on time. But if you aren't on the right road in the first place, then it's a moot point.

Now, the vast majority of the rallies that we have take part in have been simple course following rallies with basic Tulip or some other simple instruction to follow. We tried a trap rally once and hated it. Our brains just aren't wired to deal with cryptic, hidden clues that you have to decipher before calculating your route. 

That's not to say that I'm not interested in other sorts of rallies. I'm always on the look out for other ideas on ways to present rallies with regards to the next Rum Runner (whenever it is) and being of British heritage I look to the home country for ideas. In fact just the other week I came across some instructions for last years "Tour of Cheshire" road rally that involved quite a bit of map reading. I spent several hours on the site plotting the routes on the various legs from the instructions given (even though the correct route was overlaid on the maps).

Now I love maps and map reading. I always have done, right from a very early age. That might be one of the reasons I got into road rally in the first place. I even considered cartography as a career after leaving school. I find looking at maps (particularly the British Ordnance Survey maps) quite relaxing. So looking at these instructions quite naturally got me thinking about how to implement map reading into Rum Runner navigation instructions.

When it comes to maps we Brits are spoiled. Spoiled like you wouldn't believe. The Ordnance Survey have been producing maps since 1791, and these OS maps are wonderfully detailed and with one in your hand and a little basic knowledge it's not too difficult to find your way around some unfamiliar countryside.  

However, when it came to looking for maps of this quality to use for the Rum Runner, I quickly came up against a brick wall. For maps of OS standard just aren't easily available here. Sure there are US Topo maps but they don't carry anything like the level of detail that an OS map does.
Lets look at a few examples.

US Topo map

This is a US Topo map, downloadable for free from the USGS website. It's like some kind of hybrid satellite photo/map, and shows the end of the first half of the Rum Runner this year, (if you can see the road that is).  What good is a map for navigation if you can hardly see the road?

Another US Topo map

This second US Topo map has stripped away the photograph enabling you to see the contour lines and roads more clearly. But shows no other details. There are schools, churches, police stations disused rail lines and other things missing from this map that could be useful for navigation.

MNDoT Highways map

This is a Highways map from the Minnesota Department of Transportation, showing the end of the second half of the Rum Runner. Nice road detail is shown, marking different types of roads. But no other details. There are bars, churches and township halls in this area, all things that could be used to give a Rallymaster a opportunity to create interesting instructions.

An OS map sample.

This then is a much vaunted Ordnance Survey map. Where in the UK, I don't know, I just pulled a random image off the web. I expect it's Scotland, looking at the place names. Just look at the detail in the map. I can see there is a lot of pine forest, a railway line crosses the area from SW to NE as does an electric power line. A castle, phone box, and a church. So much detail for a Rallymaster to get their teeth into. For example, I have marked an A and B on the map. To get from A to B could be straightforward and easy. But let me add some extra instructions.
Use yellow and brown roads only.
Cross over the railway line.
Drive though SH 226 followed by 156. (SH is a "spot height" and is the elevation of a point above sea level you can see several marked on the map thusly .320 for example)
Cross over the railway line again.
This route would take you in a loop over the river up and down some steep hills, and around some sharp right angle bends before getting you to point B.
So much more fun than following Tulips, or any other instructions I think.
Perhaps there are maps of this level of detail available in the US, but I have yet to find them, and that's the great thing about OS maps. They are so easily available.
Lets say I go back to the UK and find out that the Mablethorpe and District Motor Club is putting on a road rally and I want to take part. I can pop into "The Paper Rack" (a small, independent local newsagent) on Seacroft Road and buy the maps I'll need in there it's that easy. If I want to buy maps like this in a store in the US I'd have to go to Outdoor lifestyle stores like Cabelas.
I think rallying could be so much more fun with maps like Ordnance Survey maps to work with.

Christmas Lights Rally 2016

It's holiday time again! Who doesn't like to get out and enjoy the Christmas lights displays on houses and in gardens that people spend days, weeks and even months preparing?
We do, and so do other members of the Twin Cities Rally Club. Every year TCRC member Mark Larson puts on a Road Rally based around a tour around some of the best lights in the Twin Cities metro area. The rally has been a Christmas fixture for many years and is very popular and a good turn out is guaranteed, drawing members of the TCRC, both road rallyists and stage rally crews too as well as the general public.
The location for this years tour was the same as last year, South St. Paul and Inver Grove Heights. But with many, many lit houses in the area, we were not guaranteed to see the same lights again. Some of the major displays were kept on the route, but there were also new ones to see, and as one of the property owners, (or perhaps it really was Santa) told me that every year the day after Christmas he's in the stores looking for new elements to incorporate into the following years display. So even the same displays change over the years.
Lack of snow in Minnesota imparted a different feel to the event this year. It certainly made driving around easier but there was a definite atmosphere missing that only snow at Christmas can add.
As usual my wife did the driving and I navigated using the map given to us at check in. We then headed out touring the lights and answering questions on the displays we saw on a pre-prepared sheet.
Having just finished my first stage rally as a co-driver I have to say that it was often easier to do that than navigate the route of this event. At least in the frozen Minnesota forests I was only concentrating on one set of instructions, whereas here in addition to following the route, I was keeping an eye out for limousines and mini coaches as well as trying to answer the questions along the route. Questions like "How many lighted Poinsettia plants are there between 54th street and 59th street?"

"How many lights on the tree?" Just kidding, that wasn't one of the questions.

How many Santa's? Snowmen? Polar Bears?

Minions seemed to be very popular choices for displays this year.

Plotting this route must've been quite the task for organizer Mark as he managed to keep nearly all the displays on the right hand side of the car so people wouldn't have to worry about crossing roads in front of traffic to get a closer view of the displays to answer the questions.
This is not a serious rally at all, and much hilarity often ensues at the scoring after the event when peoples interpretation of what constitutes a star or a snowflake differs from the official results. The generals for the event state. " A snowflake is not a star and a star is not a snowflake" and  also stated "you are expected to know the difference between a camel and a donkey." With so many of the answers to the questions being down to personal perception sometimes there were elements of a trap rally involved
I said this last year and it's worth repeating again. That if your local rally club is looking for something different as a holiday celebration then you might want to look at an event something like this. We're already looking forward to next year.
With that I'll say a big thanks to Mark and crew for putting the event on and I'll leave you with a picture my favourite display on the course. Merry Christmas!

A Santa recreation of the famous Belgian Manneken Pis statue.

Nemadji Trail Rally - The in car video

Now let's take a look at the in-car footage from the Nemadji Trail.

Stage one: As I mentioned in the blog post we almost forgot to turn the camera on. You'll get a feel for how slippery the conditions were as we enter the first corner, aquaplaning on the slushy, icy mud. All the way along the stage you see how very busy Dan is with the steering wheel, I was so busy concentrating on the course instructions I was barely aware of all that activity. On a lighter note, watch out for the snowmen built by the course marshals as we travel along the stage. I think there's four, perhaps five. Perhaps the fifth one was the one placed on the route for the 000 course inspection car driven by Joe Lipinski to demolish.

Stage two: About halfway through the stage you'll hear me give the instruction "entering the complex" this was because I couldn't read the instructions as they were printed on the course notes. Coming from the other direction, as the trail looked totally different here was no problem with reading the instructions. In another area of the course you'll also hear me describe a very, very long right as "superduper long" I doubt this term will enter the rally lexicon. 

Stage three: We did actually forget to turn the GoPro on.

Stage four: I think some caution is evident as we set off on the final stage, the most important thing for us to do now is finish. But by the end of the stage we are flying as much as the conditions would allow us to "fly". In the dark, everything looks different again. Even though we travelled the same 8 miles of road four times each time it was different. As we cross the finish at the end of the stage our joy at completing the event is evident.

In closing, I want to properly thank Susi Little and her team of volunteers for putting on the event. An event like this can't be put on without a great team of volunteers, even more so when you realize that Susi was actually co-driver in one of the other cars as well. The course workers were clearly having a great time, witness all the snowmen built along the stage. Next year I hope to see even more snowmen and perhaps a Christmas tree or two lining the way.

Nemadji Trail Rally report

The big day arrived.

It doesn't seem like it was September when Dan asked me if I'd be interested in co-driving for him, it all went by so fast. All the fun and games of fitting seats, dismantling gear boxes and studying in car videos was about to bear fruition.

Duquette, MN is only 90 minutes drive from home, so my wife and I arose early for a Saturday to make the trip up there. It's a small town, all you can see from the main road is a store, the community center and a bar, all of which were "Rally Headquarters".  When we arrived activity was just starting, but pretty soon the place was teeming with car transporters and rally cars with workers busying themselves with all kinds of tasks.
My co-drivers tasks will eventually include supervising the set up of our service area, but as it's my first rally and I have novice entrants briefings to go to, coupled with the fact it's a small regional rally and there's not much to do I was excused that.
I was able to register the car and collect my Rally America license, this was a big deal for me. I felt "official". I just wish I'd taken a better picture...

I don't like the picture at all, it's my fault, I took it.

Novice briefing is important. Lets face it I'm about to do something dangerous.
Very dangerous. If we have a serious "off" it's not like NASCAR where aid would be there to us in seconds. Here, in the middle of a forest in the winter it might be as much as an hour before medical assistance could arrive. Procedures are in place to make sure aid gets to incidents as soon as possible and it's every entrants duty to know them. I will have to attend mandatory novice safety briefings for at least the whole of next year to make sure I'm familiar with them.
With the all important safety out of the way Dan and I clambered into his F-150 and went out on recce to check the stages. We had been given course notes, but it was important to get out there and see if we agreed with them and make our own notes, we certainly felt the need to make changes. Seeing the course for the first time was a shock. I had watched some in car videos of the course and I immediately notice that the course looked nothing like the videos. We might as well have been on a different set of roads.
The Monday before the event had seen about 4" of snow fall on the stage route, but unseasonably warm conditions during the day and some nighttime freezing during the week had left the course in a mess. Frozen sections covered in snow, and muddy, slushy sections with no traction. In some places the inside of a curve was frozen and the outside a slushy mess or vice versa. Some of the more experienced drivers said these were some if the worst conditions they'd seen.
One particular short section mid course caused me some problems, for no matter how hard I tried I just could not say the instruction.
"Left 5 short, Right 6 over crest short, Left 6 short into Right 3 into Left 3 into Right 3". So Dan decided on. "Entering complex, Right 3 into Left 3 into Right 3." I could say that. If the car was lined up right it was almost a straight shot through the fives and sixes, so calling them was almost a moot point.
With that tongue-twister conquered we headed back to service for lunch and some pre-race reflection.
I strolled around the service area looking at the other cars, wondering what it would be like when I got nervous, for I had been so busy doing things I hadn't had a chance to dwell on it. I didn't eat much for lunch for I had been cautioned that perhaps I should take some dramamine for motion sickness just in case. But I'd left it at home, so I wasn't going to give my stomach an excuse to deposit its contents all over the inside of the car. It turned out I needn't have worried.
I chatted with a few other crews, everyone was very friendly. Even more so when they found out it was my first event.
The appointed hour grew near, and we changed into our race gear. Still no nerves.
I was strapped fully into the car for the first time. The belts were awkward to find, the central catch seemed too far away. Nothing seemed to fit properly. It was a good job crew chief Ben Anderson was on hand to adjust the belts to fit.
I'm in. The HANS is strapped down. Head movement is more than I thought it would be. Arm and body movement is almost non existent.
"I can't reach to turn the GoPro on." I told Dan. He knew where to find the on/off button so our efforts would be recorded.
With that, the engine fired up and we were on our way. Pulling up at MTC 1 on time and heading out to the stage.
It was only a short transit to the stage start and we were soon lined up at the arrival control with everyone else I handed my scorecard in for the first of many times.
"Hello." Said the control worker. I knew that voice. It was Dave Fuss, Twin City Rally Club member whom I knew well. It felt good to see someone I knew just as I was about to set out. I remarked to him that it was nice to see a friendly face.
One by one the cars departed.
"Look at that." Dan muttered to himself as he watched a car leave. "No traction. It's taken over 20 seconds to do that 300 yards to the first corner."
The start line. The starter counted us down.
"Ten seconds!" His voice was clear despite the burbling engine note of the car and my crash helmet blocking other sounds out.
"Shit Dan! We've not turned the GoPro on!"
He calmly reached back and it beeped into life.
"...Four, Three, Two, One, GO!"
We're off.
I'm not going to bore you with a blow by blow account of the runs, you can watch the videos when I have finished the editing and posted them.
I wasn't nervous, not at all. The level of concentration it took to keep one eye on the notes and the other on the road obliterated everything else from my thoughts. I was peripherally aware of Dan working the steering wheel hard and at times I felt the back end slide around. It wasn't until I saw the in car camera footage that I saw how incredibly busy Dan was at the wheel. Occasionally I glanced up to see where we were and would catch a glimpse of one of the many snowmen the course workers had made along the route.
Just over 12 and a half minutes later we crossed the finish line. Stage 1 done. I've done something I never ever thought I'd do.
We were exhilarated. The conditions had been dire but SS1 was in the bag.
We were all allowed about half an hours respite before turning around and heading back. It was a chance for everyone to laugh and joke and compare experiences out there.

The car rests at the turn around.

Then it was back in the car to head the other way. The course looked totally different coming from the other direction. The abbreviated instructions to get us through "the complex" worked and I was now relaxed enough by the end of the stage to wave to my wife who was a stage worker on the last corner. In a smidge over 12 minutes after we left stage 2 start we were at the finish line. Our scorecard was marked and we headed to the mid event service. Even though we had completed two clean runs Dan wondered if perhaps we hadn't flattened a tire.

mid event service.

Ben was on hand at the service to check things over. No puncture, no damage. Perhaps a fender was a bit loose. I want to put out a big thanks to Ben for being there for the car on a Saturday afternoon in December in the middle of Minnesota.
A handful of trail mix and a Gatorade and we were off back to the stage. This time it was dark. The course once again would be totally different.
It was an eerie sensation watching the car headlights sweep across our field of view illuminating the way, sometimes things were a little indistinct, but my calling of the route helped to find the way. All to soon SS3 was over and there was another half hour break to chat and compare notes.
We pulled up to the start of stage 4.
The final stage.
We had 8 miles to go to finish our first rally together. Crashing off now is not an option. Not on the last stage. We had no idea how we were doing. If we had known we might have pushed harder and had an accident. The most important thing was to get to the finish. It was a cautious start, but after a while we were up to speed and Dan was in his groove. I'd seen his confidence grow in the last run. He went from repeating my instructions to him early in the run to asking for them by the end.
We weren't heroes entering the final corner but we sure as heck did gun it down the final 300 to the finish.
Now we were ecstatic! First bumps all round! We had finished our first rally together!
Heading back to the final control there were mixed feelings, we were happy that we had finished but the conditions had put paid to any fast times. We had enjoyed ourselves and had a good time overall.
The car was trailered and everyone gathered around for a final time to discuss the goings on. Cigars were passed around because I had completed my first rally. The camaraderie amongst the crews is something else. Everyone laughs and jokes together afterwards. Even during the service break there was sharing of tools and bits, everyone is everyones friend and we're are all out to have a good time. I was made to feel very welcome every step of the way, so a big thank you to all my fellow competitors, both drivers and co-drivers for that.
With cigars smoked and the world put to rights, we headed into the awards ceremony. I had no expectations of winning anything. This was a good competitive in class G2 so fourth or fifth would be very good according to Dan. So imagine my shock when after checking the results Dan walked over to me, shook my hand and said.
"Congratulations partner. Third in class. We scored a podium."
Seriously?
I was amazed. I wasn't prepared for that. Those conditions that were bad for us were just as bad for everyone else. We had made good decisions, worked well together and ultimately it paid off.

The happy crew of car #958 with their trophies

The trophy.

At the very start of this quest I labelled the experience "Interview at Nemadji". If we worked well together and were successful then I'd probably be in the co-drivers seat next year. I think I passed.
So with that, we will see you at the Headwaters Rally in Walker, MN in May.