TeamD Adventures

Lots of ice on leg 3. All of Team D made it through in one piece. No scores yet. Dinner is done. Sleep soon.

Here’s where it all goes wrong for car 6. Leg 2 regularity 1 goes fine but not so much regularity 2. Starting with an oncoming truck (we oull over to avoid being squished) right before a checkpoint, then continuing with a missed (by 100 meters) left turn at a checkpoint and continusing with calculation oddities. Not that we are sitting at the back of the pack, mind you, but at this point the win is firmly beyond our grasp.

At the driver’s meeting, the rally organizer promissed gravel, mud, snow, and ice. So far we’ve seen all four.Leg one was one 87K regularity. We took approximately 75 of that getting our factor right.

Snow is thin but prevalent with patches of ice and mud.

Next up is leg 2 which consists of two 70+ regularities.

Today was transit to Cache Creek day and all is well with the world.

We started at approx. 1pm at Steve’s house (after a quick photo shoot) and proceeded north.

Going east from I-5 at the Mount Baker Highway, we made our way to the Sumas crossing. Aside from being a more direct route to Canadian Route 1, it also tends to be a less populated crossing. In fact, when we passed through (after stopping at the Duty Free for some important rations) we only had one car in front of us.

We are now sitting in the hotel room wasting time in the best way we know. Tomorrow will find us out on the gravel/snow/slush. Fantastic.

The provisional start order for Totem 2006 has been posted at the Totem Website. TeamD is sitting pretty. Eric and Steve are second on the road, behind last year’s BC TSD Champion RJ Carroll and codriver Michelle Mah. Marvin and I are 6th on the road, sandwiched between two very competitive teams (Gary Webb and John Kisela in front and Glenn Wallace and R. Dale Kraushaar in back). Greg and Navigator-To-Be-Named-Later are two places behind us in 8th.

My preference on most rallys is 5th on the road. Up front and I feel the heat of leading the pack (plus if there’s snow, you are clearing the road and there aren’t too many, if any, tracks to follow). Too far back and the possibility of getting stuck behind someone increases, not to mention the chance of an angry local who has been buzzed by an earlier car and wants to take his/her frustration out on someone.

It’s been raining pretty hard up here in the Pacific Northwest the last week. Maybe you’ve heard about it? For someone like me who’s 93 year old house comes with a tiny detached garage full of yard implements, finding a dry place to work on the car is a challenge. This week I have had to fit the harness bar and the rally computer mount back into the car and I was hard pressed to find a location that would allow me enough room to pull this off without filling the interior of the car with water.

Then it struck me. I had a perfect place at my disposal. The parking garage at my office is dry and what it lacks in good lighting it makes up for in room to spread out.

I took yesterday’s lunch break down in P5. I mounted the bar, installed the camera mount (I am going to record some (if not all) of the rally for posterity), and swapped the normal glove box out for the computer mount. Once Marvin drops off the computer and radio tonight, I can test the sensors to make sure that I am getting pulses [A good thing to do at least a few hours before heading out on a 5-6 hour drive to the rally location, if only to give yourself some more time to fret and worry about the sensor that you really don’t want to try to fix since it’s almost 11pm and it’s raining outside and really, didn’t you want to run in paper class anyway? After all, there’s only two people in that class so you are guaranteed at least six PCC points.] and the car will be just about ready for our trip north to BC.