TeamD Adventures

I was glad to be at the start, but sad I wasn’t coming along this time.

A tougher rally day. We ran the 11% grade and Blackwater TSDs early in the morning. We’ve moved out of the smoke from the fires that have blanketed the area for days.

It’s only now, ten days after the rally, that my heart has slowed enough to allow access to a coherent memory of the event. The driving challenge of The Thunderbird varies year-by-year, in pace with the snow cover on the roads. Before the 2010 running, we saw pre-run photos that suggested manageable levels of the white stuff, and the measuring teams’ reports posted to specialstage conformed; all the signs pointed to “one of the gentler Thunderbirds” (in the words of the Steward after a pre-running of the course). Well, t’was not so — and that we thought it would be so, was just our pride and hubris. Late last year, after Totem, on this forum, I predicted that “some team” wasn’t far away from zeroing both days of a BC Winter rally. With renewed humility, I’ll admit that I thought we might be that team — and that the rally would be The Thunderbird. . the running figure is the navigator, deploying the warning triangle. . . . . . don’t see the driver moving yet. . . . . . and there’s a control car just after the bridge. The bottom line was all that you would wish: To our great relief, driver and co-driver were okay; and the control car, skippered by an AlCan veteran, extracted the competitor car once the rest of the field had passed; and (to tell the truth) had the car in front of us not gone off there, we might well have: I was driving hard. Let us give a moment of thanks for the happy endings. Aside from “absence of anyones’ injury”, driving the car home is a primary goal. So, thereafter, we unwound ourselves, and took a time dec, and plowed on. Hubris -20. Snow there was on section 5, more snow than ANYBODY wanted. We curled back up the same approach for section 6 on Saturday, and no one mourned when we were given an “L at Stop” rather than the “Acute Right at Stop” that’d led into the travail. Saturday night’s scores looked like the old Thunderbird scores: leader at 14 points? Yep, that makes sense. No ties, either. Drivers and co-drivers had good things to say about the locations of controls… “It’s how you get separation in the Unlimited class — put controls just after the hard bits”.

Silence means many things. In this case it means I’ve been too busy to throw in my two cents and things are slipping by. What, do you ask, is slipping by? Why, let me tell you…. If you have specific comments or questions, please post them here and I will endeavour to answer them as I can.

We started out early at the Marriott as car #4. In front of us in car #3 are McKinnon and Putnam. Behind us are Toney and Hanson. The bikes start around #10. We started out in Kirkland. We covered the Mosquito Lake section first thing. Scores are in: We’re in 2nd place with 3 points. The leaders are car #2, Wallace/Krausharr with 1 point.