Adventures of a FWD guy in a RWD car

So, most of you know me as "that guy in a Golf". I may not be the fastest guy around but I don't pussyfoot either. I've been rallying a Golf for 10 years, and a few months ago I figured I'd try something different.

Doug Nagy of Streetwise has this old '82 Toyota Corolla. It's got quite a few rallies on it, and at one time had pretty built 200+hp motor in it, but that motor went into something else, and in the meantime he's patched the car together with a stock 1600 DOHC motor and some 45 sidedrafts. Stock gearbox, stock rear end, with some sort of LSD. So back in February or March, I talk to him and ask him about renting it for Gorman, a rally whose tight and twisty roads I know well. I figure it'll be a good learning experience.

Part 1: It ain't FWD, you Douche Canoe

Friday night, the car shows up, and I spend some time adjusting the belts and so on. I take it out for a test drive and everything seems fine, so I go to bed all ready to rally in the morning. I've talked to various RWD people around and they warn me that it'll take a fair amount of throttle to get it to turn, so I make a mental note of that and head off to bed.

Saturday comes along and we head out for the first stage. Since the carbs are too big for the motor, they load up, but a few blips of the throttle clears them out, and I peg it at around 6000 rpm and we launch and away we go. The engine really likes being wound up, so I'm driving mostly in 2nd gear, keeping it in the 5-7K rpm range. I'm kind of tentative with it, but it seems to be handling OK, and I don't seem to be swapping ends on every corner.

Three miles into the stage, there's a tight hairpin, an uphill Left 1 onto a different road. I go into that on a middling line, and the car just plows. Without thinking about it, I hold the throttle and my left foot comes over and taps the brake. In my Golf, this would cause the back end to kick out and the car would come around. This time, the car instantly straightens out and FOOOM! Right into the bank.

Crap.

So I try to put it in reverse - no synchro there. "ZZZZZzzzzzzz..............chunk". Back up. No synchro on first either - "ZZZZZzzzzzzz..............chunk". Off we go.

The car climbs up the hill pretty well, and down the other side to the finish. Great. Learned something. Don't brake mid-turn.

The next stage is more open, and we do ok - fourth fastest.

The third stage is a repeat of the first. We go out and I'm determined not to stuff it again, so I'm making an mental effort to keep my left foot off the brake. In fact, I'm making sure that I keep it well out of the way, on the dead pedal in the corner, unless I have to shift.

We come to that left 1, and I set it up and hit the throttle. The back end pivots out and the car comes around perfectly and I whip the wheel back the other way and we straighten out and go zipping up the hill. "Hey! That's kinda cool! I got this."

A few turns later, we come to a right 2. I slow for it, get the car set, and use the throttle to get it to come around - works perfectly. So we're in this right-hand powerslide, and there's a short straight, so I do what I would ordinarily do - whale on the throttle. Well, in a FWD car, the front wheels would grip and straighten out the slide and we'd go zipping down the straightaway. In this case...

The back end is still sliding, and I have some left lock dialed in as we're powersliding to the right. When I floor it, the back suddenly digs in, and BAM...we snap oversteer to the left, right off a cliff.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Ok, we don't go completely off the cliff. Instead, go partly off and then get stuck on a berm. My codriver gets out and heads back up the hill to do the triangle thing. I start to get out, but as soon as I take my foot off the brake, the car starts to roll forward, down the hill.

I decide that I'm going to just sit there and hold the brake until sweep comes.

So, I sit there for 20 minutes, and sweep hooks us up. They first try towing us back out with just one truck, but the rear end starts sliding over, so they stop and hook up a second truck to stabilize it laterally. Then they resume pulling and haul us back up onto the road. I'm sitting in the car the whole time, looking at the lovely view of what I could be soon rolling into.

There's been no actual damage to the car, so my codriver gets back in and we cruise to the finish, and then head to service, fully expecting to be DNF'd. At service we find that we're allowed to rejoin the rally under SuperRally rules, but they've already done the reseed so we're going to be at the back of the pack. We get something like 10 minutes worth of penalties and a three minute window from the last car, but we're still in it.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Part 2: Oooooh! So that's how it works!

So, the next leg we go out with this three minute window. I'm starting to get the hang of it, and we only have a couple of incidents. In one I start to brake in the middle of a turn and then remember at the last second that that doesn't work and nail the thottle and we go from heading straight at an embankment to being pointed down the straight. In another I get a little overzealous with the throttle and we fishtail a bunch but I manage to collect it.

I'm also finding that the more even weight distribution helps to keep it from crashing in on the nose on small jumps, so I can just power through them whereas in the FWD car I have to lift just before the jump and then nail the throttle as we go over it to keep the nose up.

We keep eating up our three minute window. After the first stage of this leg, we check in two minutes behind the last car, and on the second stage of it, we check in on the same minute. So we must be doing ok. The control worker on the third stage is pretty savvy and realizes that we're eating up the last-place car, so he holds us in the control and give us a four-minute window. All well and good.

On the last three stages of that leg, we gradually eat up that window and start the final stage about a minute behind the last-place car.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Part 3: I think I got this.

There's a long break, and there's nothing wrong with the car, so we get reseeded back to where we should be for the final leg. That ends up being the second place 2WD car. We've apparently been putting down some pretty respectable times during the middle leg.

So we head out to the final daylight stage. We've been running the intercom off a battery all day, so we've switched it for a supposedly-fresh one from my codriver's bag. Unfortunately, it's not fresh, and the intercom goes fuzzy about four turns into the stage, and then cuts out entirely a few turns later. I end up driving the stage entirely from memory. We're the third-fastest 2WD car, about 2 seconds slower than the fastest one.

For the final two stages, we get a working intercom, and I start really getting a handle on the car. I realize at one point that on exits of turns, I'm just flinging the wheel free and then catching it. We're again third fastest 2WD on the last two stages. We've gotten a few seconds quicker but one of the other cars has gotten even faster.

When we finally finish, we find that even with our 10 minutes of penalties we've been two cars. It puts us way down in the final standings, but if you take out our penalties, we would've been second 2WD overall, and about sixth in the standings - not too shabby.

It was fun. I'm not sure I got the whole yee-haw thing, but it was definitely a different experience. I think more time in a RWD car would be educational - I was pretty timid at some spots and was really struggling to unwire the FWD parts from my brain.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Awesome posts, and a good fun read.
Are you worried at all that the experience will mess with the FWD side of the brain?

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Enablers, All of you.

that was entertaining and nicely set up with the post breaks


I was worried when I switched from fwd and awd (rallycross) to rwd that I'd be a bumbling mess, but since I started life in rwd I picked it right back up and felt like I was back home again.

Ah, yes. A Jedi's weapon, much like your father's. By now you must know that your father can never be turned from the Dark Side. So will it be with you.

-Emperor Palpatine (a big fan of RWD)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/2013 05:57PM by Slowwpoke.

He's had a taste in a foul car without power....

It gets a lot better.

Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!

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JohnLane

Overkill is consistently more fun

That is a really good story, Hoche; thanks a bunch for sharing. One of the best inet rally reads for a long time for me. A friend of mine did the exact same thing in my oldest Opel over 30 years ago; he was a Saab guy. The first hairy turn, he reverts to the hard-wired reactions in his FWD brain, and we go straight at 90 left, jump right across a creek and end sideways up on a 'shelf' from the remains of an old logging drag across the creek...with no way to get back. That was an interesting and very loooong night getting home from the nowhere in the middle of rural Appalchia....And I did the reverse in a test drive of an FX16; how it stayed off the guard rail is a miracle; the sales guy was acting like that guy the recent commercial where Jeff Grodon goes to drive a Camaro disguised as a total non-race guy....."You're an idiot....I'm gonna kill you!"....LOL

Hey Hoche, you need to do high powered RWD on some of the narrower forest type stage roads. You want to keep the REAR wheels in the clean tracks so sometimes you have the car set with the nose a few feet deep into the weeds on the corner's inside...all the while wondering if you are gonna find something interesting all of a sudden in those weeds...!
Regards,
Mark B.

I wonder which transition is easier...
I'm a confirmed RWD snob, but have had an opportunity to run FWD. I was by no means driving to the car's fullest potential, but to me, FWD seemed cleaner and less dramatic. Yuck.

Yeah, I suspect that to be doing it right, I really need to be planting the nose on the inside of the corner and using the throttle to pivot around it. I'm not there (yet???). I started doing some of that on the last couple of stages, but when you've got a big rock face on one side and a big drop-off on the other and you're in a borrowed car that acts completely differently from your normal one you tend to be a little bit cautious. Or at least I do. I don't really want to buy another rally car at this point, particularly not a crumpled-up one.

What I really should do is think about it for a few days and then go and run the car again at another rally. That's probably not going to happen though.

Bob: yes, I'm very worried about that. I'm also worried that I'll get back into my regular car and everything will feel comfortable and I'll forget everything I learned this weekend.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Quote
Slowwpoke
I wonder which transition is easier...
I'm a confirmed RWD snob, but have had an opportunity to run FWD. I was by no means driving to the car's fullest potential, but to me, FWD seemed cleaner and less dramatic. Yuck.

Which transition is easier is a question I can't answer as I've only gone one direction. When I started out in FWD, I drove it pretty clean and kind of prided myself on that. As I've gotten faster, I drive it more sideways (depending on the grip of course), but there's a lot more finicky pedal dancing.

I'm definitely no expert on the RWD thing, but if I were to sum it up I'd say that in FWD there's a lot of action on the throttle and brake with relatively little steering, and in RWD there's a lot of action on the throttle and steering with relatively little braking.

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Self-righteous douche canoe

Exactly! The middle pedal is for transits.

Like most cars, they are all set up a little different, one rwd car isn't necessarily going to act like the next. The next time I see you at a rally, with my Celica, take it for a test drive on a stage road. You'll find that with the engine being torque dominant, rather than the 4age hp dominant/torque-less, that it'll drive a lot differently. I can tap the brakes in a corner (when the bias is set correctly, more to the rear) to slide the back end a bit. Then with the torque, gradually roll onto the gas to control the drift until the front wheels and car are both pointed in the correct direction, straight down the road. Then a tiny blip off the gas to settle the suspension before mashing down on the gas pedal and taking off... With the 4age Toyota engine, it's much more of a struggle, since you have to keep the engine wound up so high to get any decent power from it.
Great write up on your experience. Wish we could have gotten you off that burm a lot quicker.

-Jon

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Slowwpoke
I wonder which transition is easier...

I'm a RWD driver through and through. I drove volvos as my Daily driver forever and thrashed the hell out of them. My first rally car was a RX7.

Where the comparison comes in is that I shared the RX7 with my co-driver in rallycrosses and he was a FWD guy who went on to be successful in a Gr2 Golf. He had massive trouble running the rally cross courses without spinning out in the RWD car yet when I took his golf for a run on a test day, it came to me quickly. At the end of the day I'd admit he's a much better driver than I am, but not in a RWD car.

The main difference, I find, is you have to be further ahead of a RWD car than a FWD car.

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First Rally: 2001
Driver (7), Co-Driver (44)
Drivers (16)
Clerk (10), Official (7), Volunteer (4)
Cars Built (1), Engines Built (0) Cages Built (0)
Last Updated, January 4, 2015

Quote
john vanlandingham
Blame is for idiots. losers.