Rallye-Defi

Success or failure?

We ripped a mount point out of the rear sub-frame on the first stage (which was very rough)... the Nissan 240SX has a multi-link, independent rear suspension, so missing one link shouldn't affect much :-) Yeah right

Well we made it to the end of the stage, but exceeded the long time... I made a road side, jury rigged repair... bolted the torque link (I think that's what it's called) back in using the 1/2 a hole that was remaining, strengthened it using a ratchet strap to keep some tension on there, and transited to the next stage with 99 hard on our tail. We checked into the next stage 9 minutes late (1:30 penalties). We had completed a 40km (?) transit already, had this stage in and out, 40km transit again, then return on the really rough stage, and a 30km (?() transit back to service... so 3 stages and about 100km of transit. It's hard to drive slow when you want to go fast, but I knew I had to in order to get to do the rest of the rally... We exceeded the long time on all the 3 stages, but the temporary repair held and we made it back to service. Now we could repair the damage and try to claw back some time.

We fixed things at service and were good to go for the rest of the day... 5 short spectator stages. I knew we couldn't make up much time on the 2WD field on these quick sprints stages...

About this time Ferd confessed his mistake... Ahem... "I check us into service 2 minutes early. I forgot we exceeded the long time"... Duh! "No problem, I failed in the prep department causing us 1.5 minutes in penalties and several more minutes in lost stage time. We're even."

With all four stages so far exceeding the long time, and 3.5 minutes of penalties, we're now almost 9 minutes behind the leading 2WD team! Failure!

There were still 17 stages left, the 5 short sprints I mention above, then the whole second day. The rest of the rally is a long story, that eventually Ferd will tell I'm sure. My opinion was we couldn't fail any worse, we were in last place! So we went into MaxAttack!! mode. We took the fastest 2WD time on 16 of the 17 remaining stages! At the end we were less than 3 minutes behind the 1st place 2WD car, and only 30 something seconds off the podium. In my mind that was a success!

Not our best result ever, but our best come back for sure!

-Martin.

Just think - you'd NEVER had made such blistering-good times if you had been running "out front", would you?

Good Show!

---

Parfois, on fait pas semblant!

I am:
I know:
I am from:

Nobody.
Nothing.
Nowhere.

Yeah good job!

Press on Regardless! Nice work!
Doug

Your right, if we'd been doing well we probably wouldn't have pushed as hard as we did in the 'we can't screw up any more' situation... of course we could have screwed up more by wrecking the car, but we didn't! We did banana a front strut insert which didn't cost us any time and we changed it in service (bent on first run of Elmitt-Dosch).

There was one fast section on Elmitt-Dosch stage of about 5kms of undulations... they were described by one competitor as moguls, which was pretty accurate. We were bouncing and banging off these flat in 4th gear at times, including the finish line which we literally flew across... I was concerned we wouldn't break the timing beam!

Here's the results which I believe are in an acceptable format...
Results here

-Martin.

I was really impressed with Gauvreau & Roussin's pace in those first few stages, in a Production Fiesta! Geez, they've really stepped it up recently.

Sucks on the damage front. Is the 240SX's rear subframe bolted in, just swap it in service? It must be nice.

I look forward to the car/ski jumping videos from Ferd for Elmitt then

Yes they were flying in the Fiesta on the first 4 stages. Most in 2WD were being especially cautious, last year a significant portion of the 2WD field retired in the first 4 stages. This year only 1 and 4 were really rough... I mean a mine field of small appliance size rocks.. and those were the loose ones. The embedded rocks were even bigger! Only one car rolled (totalled?) on stage 1 this year.

Yes on the 240SX the rear subframe bolts in, but we don't carry a spare... we carry a welder instead It got a lot of use this weekend... only the once by us! A few times by Paul

-Martin.

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MRWmotorsports
We exceeded the long time on all the 3 stages...

Actually we were within in the long time on the first very rough stage, Montcalm South, even though half of it was done with the left-rear suspension flopping around loose. We were also within the long time for both passes of the Lac des Plages turnaround stage, North and South, with the suspension held together by a ratchet strap.

But, we were very sensibly two minutes slower than the long time on the return run on the wicked rough Montcalm North (EC04). It would have been ludicrous to risk any more speed than that over all those huge boulders for fear of tearing the ratchet strap loose and suffering a DNF.

That's when I failed. I was so happy that we actually made it back to Service in one piece, that it never even occurred to me to account for those two extra minutes in our transit time. I checked us in two minutes early. Stupid!

It was only when Chuck was telling me during Service, how he and Paul Hartl had missed the long time on EC04 by exactly 1:00.1 and had to take that into account for their transit, that it clicked in my mind. Oh no, did I just screw that up for us? D'oh!

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MRWmotorsports
We took the fastest 2WD time on 16 of the 17 remaining stages!

We were ~23 seconds slower than Burden/Nadeau in the Jetta on Elmitt-Dosch-1 (EC11), and astoundingly also 5 seconds slower than Paul Hartl/Chuck Storry. We were stunned because we thought we had gone insanely fast. Paul blew up his left rear strut on this one though. We went even more insanely fast after that on the second pass of Elmitt-Dosch (EC14), a whole 1:17 faster than any other 2wd team.

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MRWmotorsports
Not our best result ever, but our best come back for sure!
In my mind that was a success!

It's too bad that our comeback fell short of the podium, and because of that nobody really took any notice of our pace. But that really was one of the most satisfying performances we've ever had!