Back in the good old days when men were men and they didn't need any of this fancy, newfangled "safety equipment."

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Jay
You can't safetygear all the risk out and if you could you might make the thing not worth doing in the first place.

Taking risks has NEVER been one of my motivations for getting involved in rally. Then again there are risks in anything we do and accepting that there are risks is what allows people to get out of bed in the morning.
Preparing for and managing the risks is what allows you to be fast and relatively safe. Taking calculated risks is sometimes a part of getting on the podium. If a driver told me they were in the sport because they liked taking risks I probably wouldn't co-drive for them.

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Morison
Taking risks has NEVER been one of my motivations for getting involved in rally. Then again there are risks in anything we do and accepting that there are risks is what allows people to get out of bed in the morning.
Preparing for and managing the risks is what allows you to be fast and relatively safe. Taking calculated risks is sometimes a part of getting on the podium. If a driver told me they were in the sport because they liked taking risks I probably wouldn't co-drive for them.

Of course not Keith. You used to be heavily involved in remote control toys. You are not a risk taker. But that can make for a great calculating codriver. That's also part of why stage notes are so popular. They reward the cautious and allow people to be a little more calculating about the risks they are taking. Also helps level the field. But the best people are still the ones that would probably take that crest flat out and hope the road doesn't curve and that it's not just the power lines that continue straight. Without notes that is. Notes are a good equalizer for balls and local road knowledge.
I've never seen a codriver climb out onto a crane in the middle of the night in a populated metropolis' downtown city while wearing a women's nighty.

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NoCoast

I've never seen a codriver climb out onto a crane in the middle of the night in a populated metropolis' downtown city while wearing a women's nighty.

Say Joey, ever been in a Turkish prison?

Good point Grant.
(although 'toys' is a bit misleading. I was flying 5-7 lb all composite gliders capable of over 200mph, managed two world championship teams and hosted a world championship event that attracted 28 countries with nearly 100 competitors in senior and junior classes.)

I'll also backpedal a bit here and say that I was over-reacting to 'taking risks.' I took Jay's comment to mean 'unreasonable' or 'uncalculated' risks. Likely a bad assumption on my part. As i said, there are risks in everything we do we each just have different levels of acceptable risk.

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Morison
Good point Grant.
(although 'toys' is a bit misleading. I was flying 5-7 lb all composite gliders capable of over 200mph, managed two world championship teams and hosted a world championship event that attracted 28 countries with nearly 100 competitors in senior and junior classes.)

Those sound pretty damn cool.
The Suba guys have gotten into RC cars lately. Troy's new engine will let his truck thing do 80 MPH.
I call my rally car a toy also. They may be cool and very developed, but their still toys. Until we're getting paid to deliver moonshine or transport important people through zombie infested lands, rally cars are still toys.

still.....hard to watch sometimes. I'm definitely a little soft in the middle, gonna go do some situps.

"or transport important people through zombie infested lands" So where exactly do I sign up for this?

---

Robert.

"You are way too normal to be on Rally Anarchy." Eddie Fiorelli.

Keith, were those F3B's? One of those could kill ya for sure, although I know a guy who won a $500 bet by hand catching his...

Yah - Managed the 95 F3B team that went to Romania, The 2002 F3J team that won silver (and individual Gold) in Finland and hosted the F3J Championships in 2004. F3J, balasted, are nearly as fast in a straight line as F3B planes but aren't built to take the loads in the speed/distance runs.

Catching an unbalasted F3B ship is not really that hard if you know the plane. I've flown my F3J plane into the hands of a helper about 30' away on a number of occasions (relaunching during a flight window) Balasted is a different challenge, but not that difficult either. It's actually status quo in world championships to maximise the attempts during a working time window. To do well on speed/distance runs you need to launch in lift so if you launch and there is no lift on tow you'll abort, bring the plane down and catch the model about 10' behind the flightline and then relaunch. I've seen this done, with a launch to 1000 ft or so, in under a minute to the second launch.

F3J is kinda cool - the planes are able to stop two 200lb tow-men on a pulley in their tracks on launch with a moderate (10mph) wind.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2011 01:42PM by Morison.

Yah. Managed risks. I also do commercial fireworks displays and fly hot air balloons for a living. You don't do these things for any length of time if you're a yahoo. Doing the management thing is it's own reward, here and in rally; that's what I meant.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2011 09:53PM by Jay.

Those guys in their day were crazy, us in our day, we're crazy. Just like myself and a lot of us, we rally to go fast and to feel the rush running through our viens, just as they did. Time and safety equipment have changed alot, but it has not removed the desire for a man to feel that rush, to feel alive, and to feel like a man, instead of a cunt that sits behind a desk.

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Sean Burke
Those guys in their day were crazy, us in our day, we're crazy. Just like myself and a lot of us, we rally to go fast and to feel the rush running through our viens, just as they did. Time and safety equipment have changed alot, but it has not removed the desire for a man to feel that rush, to feel alive, and to feel like a man, instead of a cunt that sits behind a desk.

Kinda a misogynistic choice of terms there Sean.
Couldn't you just as well choose some non-gender specific term like dipwad or schmuck or asswipe?

haven't watched it yet (part 1 alone is 15 min), but looks relevant:

Grand Prix: The Killer Years

umm.....wow.

Just watched all 4 parts; I cried at the end. call me soft, I dongivafuck.

Gawdammit who's chopping onions in here? Wow, that was a really good documentary. I've seen that David Purley footage before, it's totally heartbreaking. Good link, Jon, totally relevant.

Interesting to see David Sims in there, I know him from ALMS racing. He's the engineer for the Risi Ferrari team, our arch rival when I worked for PWL. I had no idea he was Jimmy Clark's mechanic when he died. Gives me a whole new respect for somebody we were at odds with all season.

We like to complain these days about how out of control the safety regulations seem to be getting. Granted some of them have more to do with liability issues in this litigious era but back then the first safety regs evolved because people were dying and being burned alive, and quite often. It was so bad the drivers got together to initiate the first safety standards, fire suits, better helmets, 6 point harnesses, etc. Let me repeat that, it wasn't the sanctioning bodies or track owners or even team owners that started to demand higher safety standards and boycott unsafe tracks, it was the drivers!

The good news is the evolution of safety requirements and equipment has worked. Climbing into a race car is no longer a death sentence. Sure the occasional freak accident occurs and someone gets seriously injured or killed but it's no longer commonplace, it's really quite rare. In 2007, when I was working for Petersen/White Lightning, Peter Dumbreck drove for us for the last few races of the season. It was interesting talking to him about his famous blowover in the Mercedes CLR at LeMans in 1999.

It was a horrific looking accident but he escaped without injury. His team mate Mark Webber had flipped both in practice and the warm up. There was something aerodynamically wrong with the cars but the team never really figured it out. The safety of the cars may have come a long way since the '60's but the forge ahead regardless attitude of the teams had not changed. As Peter told me, "It was Mercedes, there was no way we weren't going to race." Apparently, back in the paddock, Mark Webber (who was out because his car flipped during the warm up) got very upset when he saw Peter's car blow over on the video feed, exclaiming, "You've killed him!" Of course, he was OK, but it looked bad because he flew way off the track into the woods but luckily only landed amongst some small saplings. A crash like that 30 years earlier would have meant a fiery death.