Roshambo Racing

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Olympus Results

The Olympus Rally was April 24-25.  The rally was based in Ocean Shores, Washington.

This rally was a Rally America National Championship event, so there were teams there from around the country and Canada.  The fastest cars were there, including Travis Pastrana, Ken Block, Antoine L'Estage, and Patrick Richard.

Luckily, those fast guys were competing in the National rally, while we entered in the regional rally.  Our new car is fantastic, but still worth 25% what those cars are worth.  One cool thing about national rallies is that they offer "stage notes" which describe ever turn in the rally, and this rally also included recce, which gave us a chance to see all the stages in advance.

Dan drove on Saturday.  This was his first time driving the rally car in competition, after having driven the car maybe 10 total miles before that.  His goal was very simple:  Finish the rally and learn the car.  He drove slowly for the first few stages.  His goal to finish was challenged by some really rough twisty, and sloppy first few stages.  Dan did very, very well for his first time in the car.  After 64 stage miles, he finished 4th in Open class, and 10th overall in the Regional rally.  He tried left-foot braking a little bit, and got used to the traction of the new car.  He said that he felt like it was much more stable in all conditions than our old car.

Despite Dan's moderate pace, I got carsick during the 4th stage, Crane Creek.  This stage was very, very twisty and rough.  I never barfed, but it was close.  For the last three stages, Terry Hanson kindly agreed to navigate for Dan.  Terry normally navigates for his son, Travis, but they had crashed out of the rally earlier in the day.

There were no problems with the car all day and the most that our crew did was fuel the car and check fluids.


On Sunday, I drove.  The stages on Sunday were ones that I'd just driven at the Doo Wops rally in March, so I felt very comfortable on them.  We pushed on a at a moderate pace while I continued to learn the car, get more comfortable with left-foot braking, and learn to listen to the stage notes.  In the end, we finished 4th in Open Class and 5th overall in the Regional.  We were just 8 seconds behind 4th place.


We were joined by a crew from RalliTEK, who helped service the car and took lots of video over the weekend.  HUGE THANKS to RalliTEK for their support of our efforts. 

We also were joined by Bill Kostich, Bryce Nash, and Jessica Sutton in the service area.


Here are some pictures and video from the race:

This one is one the first stage, Wreck Creek.  Cool view of the ocean in the background.






Here's what we saw rounding a corner at the very beginning of the first stage: Two cars crashed.  Luckily, we didn't join them!


Here's Dan negotiating a mud pit.  I think this is the Crane Creek stage.


Here's Doug on the Brooklyn Stage.





Here's another awesome video put together by Sean Sexton of RalliTEK:
http://www.youtube.com/user/RalliTEK2008#p/a/u/0/PEqnBCh0BHU


Our next race is the Oregon Trail Rally, April 15-17.  The rally is based in Portland, but has stages as far away as The Dalles and Dufur, in the Columbia River Gorge.  Hope to see you there.

2 comments:

  1. cool pics! Too bad you got sick though. Sounds like you still did really well with Dan never having driven the car before.

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  2. Wish I could see the April race! We won't be there 'til July. -Rob

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