Rough roads, giant rocks, night stages, rollovers and big time mechanical failures. Olympus Rally can be one of the most extreme stops on the Rally America Championship.
Olympus Rally started off a little too uneventful for us: the starter wouldn't crank leaving the park expose! I had to hop out of the car and arc the starter solenoid terminals to get it freed and get us on our way. We replaced the starter after the first stage, making us 36 minutes late out of service.
The
first three stages went smooth for us, but I was trying to spare the
car from major rock strikes. By the time we got to Nahwatzel I had
pretty much given up on that, so the car was getting hammered pretty
hard. The temperature started to climb and the skidplate started to bang
around but we pressed on. At 14 miles and 240 degrees we stopped and
added water and got back on stage. The skidplate went missing a few
miles later. We smashed over a burm and through flying finish but our
temperature was above 220 again and the floor of the car was soaked. I
re-routed the heater hoses to bypass the heater core and we made it into service on donated water
(we always have AMAZING volunteers in our region), completing the Ray
Damitio Regional Rally and started out 7 hour break.
During
break we fitted a new skidplate made out of 16 ga. steel and aimed the
head lights. We did pretty terrible on the super special at the ridge,
but I don't think we were alone judging by all the gravel on the track.We headed out and did the Taylor Town / Cloquallum loop. The dust was so bad on Cloquallum that we had to stop twice and I almost took out caution tape a few times. The car was running great with the temp right at 185 deg. We headed back for service and got ready to head out and do the Taylor / Cloquallum loop again. After service we were informed that the last two stages of the night we cancelled. Considering it was 11:45 already and we had only gotten a couple hours of sleep the night before we were relieved to hear this, although somewhat disappointed that we didn’t get more miles on stage. When your that tired it’s easy to let something go, so we went home and passed out.
Sunday
morning went great for us. The car started and ran fine, had no overheating issues, and
the new improvised skidplate held up great. I started out charging pretty hard on the only stage of the day, Nahwatzel. I slowed down for the "big dip," and put more rocks to the tires than the center of the car to spare our gearbox. On the straits I didn't exceed 75 or so, which allowed the car behind us to catch up a couple times. I never saw them because once we got to the rough stuff I would pull away from them again, and on the high speed straits it was too dusty to see anything behind you. It was a great stage and I'm proud that we finished it twice, and very glad that I decided to come out and drive the Shelton roads. Unforunately, we don’t have gopro video
from Sunday’s stage, but we do have it from Saturday’s Nahwatzel run.
I’ll try to get that up soon. We had an average speed of 43 mph on
Nahwatzel 2 on Sunday.Car 178
Overall / in class
Day 1: 35 / 9
Day 2: 33 / 7
RESULTS: Regional 1 / Regional 2 / National
Entry list: http://www.olympusrally.com/entry-list/
Olympus Rally website: http://www.olympusrally.com/
Rally America website: http://www.rally-america.com/
2 comments:
Have to say that on a completely unrelated note, you have some amazing shots of your vehicle and I can't help but wonder how some of it would translate into watercolors. I do apologize that it's not really related to your original post about the race that you participated in but I had stumbled my way here. Hope you don't mind the randomness of my post and have a wonderful weekend!
Ha! No problem I always enjoy feedback. If you're a watercolor kind of person, you can feel free to reproduce these images in any way you wish.. just send me a scan! :)
Have a good St. Patrick's Day.
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