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2WD...Less Traction More Action!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/07/2011 01:56AM by stgallagher.

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stgallagher

There's a lot of rally cars in this country I wouldn't go to the 7-11 in to get a Slurpee, let alone run a rally.

Just sayin'.

Sean Gallagher

I'm with you on that, Sean.

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-Brian

Not sure how the rest of the country does it but I've kicked several cars out of tech, as well as denied issuing log books and have pulled a few log books.

Road racing is a bit different in that all the cars are in one closed location. One door in, one door out. It is easy to see and record what happened. Not so with rally. Cars break on stage or transit, tow out, load up and no tech ever sees them. Another huge difference between the disciplines is that road racing is fender to fender and carelessness or stupidity usually involves more than one car. So the issue of proper repairs and roadibilty are actually magnified in importance.

I had to keep all the logbooks at Olympus one year, what a cluster. People still left with out them. We had a stack to mail out, 2 or 3 got lost in the process. Brilliant.

I think you are a bit off base stating that techs are friends with competitors and therefore don't care what goes thru. I haven't seen all that many frightening welds. Sure some that look a bit globby from time to time. I see more unfinished welds, many of those from actual professionals sadly, that amatuers. Pretty welds are any guarantee of proper penetration at all, and a globbed on weld can be stronger than hell. Since we don't have any way to actually judge a welds strength with a laboratory precision we have to go with the 'really horrible' appearance and gut instinct. Even possibly made worse by a lack of experience by many techs who are just volunteers at the end of the day.

I've been toe to toe with a real FIA tech at Olympus years back and he was seconds away from getting smacked, and I'm pretty hard to get to that state. He knew he was there and finally backed down but what an asshole the guy was.

I've also seen some sketchy road race construction, techs who wouldn't accept BS or FIA helmets, poor belt mounting and cars some pretty low levels of...sophistication (build level). Amature road racing is just that, amature and suffers many of the same tech and construction issues that rally does.

Commercial welds and construction techniques are so foolproof that we never see an F1 car just hit the deck when the suspension breaks going ove a ciggie butt, or a Dodge pickup control arm break, Chevy frame crack behind a steering box or a brand new whatchacallit break at a weld right out of the box just home from the store.

Rally has a bunch of issues these days but car construction is pretty closely watched and issues headed off, generally quietly behind the scenes. Emails and pre-inspections, several of us are very proactive in watching new construction. I know that Hurst, Bowers, Hoche and myself are all of the mind we are here to help people get into the sport. Many road race techs seem quite the opposite.

Seems like I remember a very unpleasant cage incident not long back form a road race cage builder and scrutineer fucking up a very easy rally cage build, but we've agreed not to talk about it...

Hurst has been working on a data base of some sort. Hard to do perfectly with all the old cars that show up once in a while or every few years. Another issue with rally is you're never guaranteed that you'll have connectivity where the event is to verify or transfer data, plus that still has to be done by volunteer people on their own time. Gets to be a lot to ask.

While an imperfect system, I think log books work pretty well in the USA. I run mostly NASA events and they keep the books and return them at the end of the event. I do not know what happens in a major off since I have luckily not had one at a NASA event.

When we crashed out of Tall Pines a couple of years ago the damage was noted in the log book but no car inspection was made.

Having been through the FIA process at Rally Mexico it is a very different system. The way it works for the FIA cars is that you bring the homologation paper work for your car which shows the design of the cage. The techs inspect the entire cage for weld quality and to make sure your cage matches what is the in the homologation paperwork.

For the national cars like mine they just inspected all of the welds but did not seem to care about the design or layout of bars in the cage. So at the start of every rally your car is inspected to be safe and it is up to you to bring a safe car to the event. Which I think is a good model. Inspecting a car in the dark at the end of the rally it is much more likely that some damage will be missed than if a more thorough inspection of the cage was done when everyone is fresh at the start of the rally.

Now my car passed tech the first time at Rally Mexico, so I cannot speak from first hand knowledge but the welds that were failed more on appearance than on any quality. They were complaining if there was any under cutting on the main tubes or pin holes in the pool at the end of the weld bead.

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heymagic
I had to keep all the logbooks at Olympus one year, what a cluster. People still left with out them. We had a stack to mail out, 2 or 3 got lost in the process. Brilliant.

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Andrew_Frick
While an imperfect system, I think log books work pretty well in the USA. I run mostly NASA events and they keep the books and return them at the end of the event. I do not know what happens in a major off since I have luckily not had one at a NASA event.

Here's a good example of looking at the same issue (holding log books) in two different parts of the country. In one part, it sucked, in the other part, the same method works well. Since the racers on the East Coast were used to it, no trouble, since they weren't on the West Coast, problems.

The interesting part then becomes "Hmmm, what are the advantages and disadvantages of X? (where X can be anything, not just this log book thing) and what are going to be problems during a transition period until this becomes normal and how long is that transition period going to be?"

An example is when the rules changed and people no long had to bring insurance/registration documents to registration. After two years, NRS regulars now don't bring them. (The RA crossovers generally do still. And you can always tell when the driver is holding a big binder. )

Anders

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Grassroots rally. It's what I think about.

Hey Anders, I've said i grew up in the US South in the 50s and early 60s----the Bad Ol' South of heavy overt racism, brutally clumsily "enforced" Christianity etc---which obviously didn't work so well for anybody...
So I came up wif what I call (I really did call it this at maybe 11 y.o.)
"John's First Social Law" and it goes
"Familiar bullshit is always better than unfamiliar goodness'.

I think it is a universal law now 48 years later.

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John Vanlandingham
Sleezattle, WA, USA

Vive le Prole-le-ralliat

www.rallyrace.net/jvab
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