TeamD Adventures

The Alcan Winter Rally is only 18 days away. Today, rally chairman Jerry Hines posted the provisional start order. Steve and I were assigned car number seven, our veteran status earning us a single digit number. Jim and Dan have been given car number eleven, a good draw considering they are first-time Alcaners. Our new TeamD colleagues Rob Dunn and Nick Marcuse, two-time veterans and winners of class III (Seat Of Pants class) in the 2002 Alcan Rally, earned car number six.

As for classes, the Subaru WRX (Jim and Dan) is in class I, passenger cars with unlimited equipment. Our BMW 325iX is also in class I. Rob and Nick’s Mazda 323 GTX is in class III, which is limited in navigational aids.

All six of us will be competing as TeamD for the Alcan Winter Rally Team Award. This new award goes to the team of three (or four) cars which scores the highest places in their respective classes. This will add some extra competition.

Part 54 of the the TeamD Alcan Winter Rally training plan required that we get out and warm up our dusty TSD rally skills in advance of the rally. On Sunday, January 25th, over two months since our last taste of competition the TeamD Alcan crews headed north to Bellingham, Washington for the 22nd running of the Armageddon Rally. This was a short five hour all-paved event but served well to remind us how to drive the cars and run the Timewise rally computers. There were no surprises and this gentle rally was smooth from start to finish. Steve and I missed first overall by a single point with a score of 16. Even more satisfying was that we came in with almost half the score of future Alcan competition Glenn Wallace and Greg Hightower. Of course we’re all warming up but it gets us feeling happy. The Alcan Rally seems closer now.

None of us was sure what to expect from the day as we set out in the early morning darkness from Seattle on January 19th. It would be a long day and our expectations were high that our day at the dedicated TeamD test facility, Lac de Glace (Ice Lake) would prove beneficial. Our rented C-130 cargo plane and flight crew were right on time and in just a few hours we were on the ground again and warming up for a day of trials and tuning on the ice.
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