Mendicino Rally 2013....what happened?

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Danger, Danger Will Robinson. Huge bitch session is coming. While we are sure everyone but us had a great time, we didn't. We kind of got spoiled by the Idaho rally and expected the same kind of experience in California. This is due in a large part to our massive noobness, but the difference in how the 2 events were run was surprising. I want to make it clear that the people who put on the rally were doing what they thought was the best. We just didn't agree with their choices and decisions.

Let me start of by saying that California as a state sucks giant sweaty balls. Most of the people we met, even the crack head looking gap tooth locals, were actually pretty nice, but the state in general would have to improve markedly to be merely horrible.

The town in which we were based was the biggest shit-hole we have ever been in. We got in Thursday evening and after checking into our moderately priced hotel (more on that later), we went out looking for some food. The town (Clearlake CA) is on a lake and like most lake towns, had a lake front road. This road usually has touristy like stuff (cafe's, shops, etc.), but often a few blocks away from the lake will be the main drag with strip malls full of chain restaurants that are a much safer place to eat in a strange town.

We turned away from the lake front road to find ourselves in the scariest neighborhood I have ever been in. The graffiti on the dumpsters had actual swastikas, the roads looked like they were once paved, but had been abandoned for years and the houses looked like news footage of inner-city Detroit. You might think this was just a little pocket of crackville, but in our attempt to get out of there, we drove though about 1/2 mile of this before we found the secret escape route. As a side note, this town had a population of about 13500, but when we drove past the cop shop we saw about 30 cop cars in the parking lot with plenty of space for more. That tells you something.

The hotel was cheap and seeming free of bedbugs. That is the best I can say. From Thursday to Saturday, maid service consisted of making the bed and hanging up the towels. I couldn't tell if we got clean sheets, but doubt it. The first day, I had washed my dirty hands at the sink and left the soap and soap dish dirty. They stayed that way until we checked out.

Enough of the town you say. You weren't there for sight-seeing, you were there to race cars. Ok, lets talk about the rally. Again, the people were wonderfully nice and really tried to put on a good event. The event, however didn't seem to want to get with the program. We hauled in Thursday so we could recce (pre-run) the stages, get our car teched, and get signed in on Friday. This is how things usually go. Friday morning we go to gather up our route books containing the pace notes (the incredibly detailed turn by turn, bump by bump descriptions of the stages) to find that there were no pace notes for the Saturday stages, just tulip notes. Tulip notes are just a very sparse description of the stages, containing only the most important features. As a comparison, in 3.5 miles of the first Saturday stage, the tulip notes contained 2 notes, each describing a minor feature. In .5 miles, the stage notes had 9 lines of notation describing over 30 features of the stage. We ended up getting pace notes for Saturday, but as they were being printed while we were pre-running the stage, they didn't really help. Nobody told us we wouldn't get the pace notes until later.This lack of communication and planning was the norm for the event.

So we get to tech and everything is going as usual until they tell us to pull up so they can jack up our car. ???????? Even at Oregon Trail (a national event), nobody jacked up our car. We went along with this as we knew everything was in order. We get to the final sign-off part and some self-righteous douche canoe decides he doesn't like the welds on our certified, log-booked roll cage. We managed to talk him off of his hill of entitlement and got his all important signature. So far, we are not impressed.

Saturday comes and we get to the service area. It is not too bad, a mostly level large dirt area (here's the bitching) surrounded by the most thorniest bushes I have ever encountered. They seemed to be able to throw their daggers of death like Ninja stars with unerring accuracy, usually aiming for the gap between my toes and my sandals. Well if these things were so hazardous, you say, why didn't you wear some real shoes? To this I reply, BECAUSE IT WAS 115 DEGREES !! Oh, did I mention that it was hot out? Anyone in their right mind would have scheduled their outside activities for early morning to avoid the smelting furnace like heat, but not the organizers. We didn't get on the stage until after noon. We didn't start the second stage until 4pm. There were 3 wrecks on the first stage and it took them 3 hours to clear things enough for us to run again. There was another wreck on the second stage (same section of road as first stage), delaying everything even more. They decided to cancel the 3rd stage and just run the last one. This helped but given that we were last in the start order, we wouldn't have been on stage until after 7:30pm. It gets dark in the mountains about 8:00pm, meaning we could have very well finished our stage in the dark.

There is lots more to this story, but already it is a wall of text (for which I apologize). The end result is that we stopped having fun after the 2nd stage on Saturday (now about 5:30pm, having raced for about 1 hour total for 7 hours of waiting). Since fun is the only reason we do this, no fun means we are done. We packed up, spent one last night in the dirty hotel room and hauled back to OR Sunday morning. We were sad to not finish, but had some real doubts of our ability to get through another day of this cluster-fsck without some kind of cataclysmic explosion of us unloading on the poor race organizers.

The good stuff ! The car ran like a champ. We hammered it on the roughest stages we have ever been on and it took the beating without complaints. Sixty minutes bouncing off the rev limiter and lots of rocks didn't phase it in the least. I think we have the last of the nagging issues (ignition, oil pressure, charging system) that come with racing a 22 y/o car dealt with. Hopefully now the damage will be from our poor driving rather than from the car deciding that it had enough. The Monolith (the tow vehicle) dragged our massive amount of stuff there and back without a hiccup. Up hill and down, 65-70 mph, all at 14-15 mpg. Much better than last time (see the Idaho post).

Finally, here are a few pictures to fully capture our thoughts and feelings about our Cali Rally experiences..

That's right, 2 broken windshields. The Subbie and the Monolith both took rock hits in Cali. A big bulls-eye for the Subbie right in the driver's area and an 18 inch crack down from the upper right corner for the truck. We seem to have trouble with car glass when rallying.

Oh, and there is this....

Twenty-five bucks (almost $30 with tip, it's not the server's fault) for breakfast at Denny's? Like I said, California as a state sucks giant sweaty balls

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hoche
I have been amusing myself by misquoting Dogberry to people all afternoon: "and, masters, do not forget to specify, when time and place shall serve, that I am a self-righteous douche canoe."

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ofensus


On stage 4 Sunday, I messed up and slid sideways in to a soft berm, two wheels over a cliff, and was pulled out by sweep.