SNO*DRIFT RALLY 2010

(Editor’s note: Adam Craig and Giant Pro Mountain Bike Teammate Carl Decker make up Team AC/CD in the sport of Rally Car racing. Here Adam relates the story of getting their rally car—known as the “Wheels of Teal”—to Northern Michigan for the “Sno*Drift Rally 2010” which was held on Saturday, January 30. He also tells how they did in the event. You can see video of the rally at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AclNaYw-gkw&feature=channel and read their results at http://www.rally-america.com/events/144/news/liveupdates/)

Progress is human nature. This is especially true for ambitious chaps like Carl and myself, hence our current utopic existence as professional athletes. We’ve been doing this Rally Car racing thing for a couple years now and having a good old time with the Northwest Regional events. Unfortunately (for our lower backs), we always knew that competing locally would eventually give way to national ambitions. With this in mind we talked fellow local Rally Driver Byron Garth into letting us use his truck to tow the Wheels of Teal and his Wheels of Really-Nice-and-Expensive-Looking across the country for the Sno*Drift event in Northern Michigan this past weekend (January 30) and subsequent Rally in the 100 Acre Wood next month. Our backs are still a bit sore from spending at least ten hours a day in various vehicles for eight days. The width of our smiles, made all the wider by all of the concerning moments we’ve faced, has made it all worthwhile though…

It all began last Saturday afternoon when we did a final bolt check and got the brakes up to snuff on the WOT (Wheels of Teal) so it would be ready to race when we unloaded in MI. Byron brought over the Dodge; we picked up our rented trailer, loaded our car, his car and were off. OK, we only made it to Longboard Louie’s for our last Bend Burrito of the week, and then were off. Unfortunately, the test drive across town didn’t give us a real picture of how terribly overloaded our setup was. For some reason a ¾ Ton Dodge towing a 24’ flatbed trailer that fit the rear tires of the second car with a whopping 3” to spare wasn’t happy with its 7,000lb load. Who knew? Carl was having a really hard time going 52mph without hitting the rumble strips on BOTH sides of a (thankfully) deserted Highway 20 East and he hadn’t even started eating his Tempura Prawn Burrito. Hmm. We made it a gripped hour down the highway, both wondering to ourselves if we should just be turning around but outwardly trying to problem solve and figure out how to make the beast drive-able. By our calculations, if we had to do 50 instead of the 65 we hoped for it would take 12 more hours to cover the 2500 miles to Michigan. Unacceptable. We stopped to re-load the back of the truck, moving all possible heavy things (everything) forward of the rear axle, even tying a couple of spare trailer tires to the (massive) front bumper of the Truck for ballast. This helped, making travel up around 54 possible without dying; passing the odd oncoming car was still terrifying though… Rolling into Juntura, Oregon at about midnight we commented on how long the “Hey! You’re approaching a village for the first time in 50 miles, slow down!” Rumble Strips were. They seemed to go all the way through town. Oh wait, that’s the sound of a flat trailer tire. We fixed it, in the process replacing two of the crappy Bias-Ply tires with our Radial spares. I finished off the drive to the Idaho Border and we called it a night at about 2am.

Sunday morning was spent perusing Craigslist Boise for an “Equalizer” Trailer Stabilizer, recommended by my Roommate Chris who uses one to control his Thule promo trailer. “This is what you need, they’re $700 and good luck finding one on a Sunday” were his words. In ten minutes we’d found three on craigslist. On the way to look at the first one the search for two more respectable trailer tires began, also on a Sunday. This ended quickly at Sears with no usable tires available and no other shops open. Oh well, to the Equalizer! Guy #1 wasn’t home as he said he would be so we decided to look in the backyard and start the installation ourselves. No luck. Just as we were discussing the prospect of a stakeout the phone rang, it was Equalizer Guy #2, he was home and only wanted $75 instead of Flakey Guy’s $150. It was the wrong way to Vern’s place, but we NEEDED this piece. An hour later, after a nice retired chap helped us install some heavy, friction-creating iron, we were on our way, cruising at 65. It was also four in the afternoon. Shoot… We followed the same clear skies and tailwind to Rock Springs, Wyoming that night, rotating driving and sleeping in the back shifts. Finally, we were underway and it looked like we might actually make it with the whole kit, not just driving our car with spares strapped to the roof…

Monday morning dawned clear and cold, we found a tire shop and got two more radials for the trailer, upping our confidence and making the truck a one-handed steering proposition all the way up to 70mph. Mint. East of Laramie we stopped and went for an entertaining XC ski on some pass, it felt soooo good to get some exercise and stretch out a bit. That night was spent somewhere in Nebraska. Our morning exercise consisted of a half hour run on which we drafted all of the objects available to stay out of the biting ten-degree wind. Mostly hedgerows but one Wal-Mart gave especially nice protection…

After driving (under still sunny skies) through some impressive post-blizzard carnage in Iowa we made Chicago at a reasonable hour on Tuesday to pick my Dad up on Wednesday morning. He’d be our pit-crew for the race. We made it to within ten miles of our lodging for the weekend with no problems before my staunch stance that GPS’s are entrapment devices for those who can’t read a friggin’ map was reinforced. We turned onto a snow and ice covered Old State road, which seemed lightly used, for the final leg. Turns out Old State was lightly used because the wood yard at the end of it was cleaned up and out of commission. This made our extremely high stakes, icy truck and trailer turnaround a breeze instead of the “tow-truck in the morning” project it could’ve been… We got “directions” from a local and pulled in right on time. To a classic “huntin’ camp” in the woods… Our accommodations, while affordable, would be quite rustic… And cold.

Right, at the race finally, that wasn’t actually that bad once we got going. Now it was time to relax. But wait, we had to do Reconnaissance on every (unique) race stage for the weekend on Thursday. That amounted to a 7:30am departure on a local drive that would last until the sun set at 5:30pm. Wow, that’s a lot of icy roads to read and adjust notes to. Byron developed a system of downgrading the turn at the end of any 300 yard straightaway from whatever it was (1-6) to a 2 in order to trick himself into slowing down enough to not blow it. Without the aid of studded tires (as per the rules) this would be a very interesting ice-drifting contest. Warm rain on snow-covered roads in the weeks before our arrival had turned everything to solid ice. You could literally ice-skate 5-15 mile stages in their entirety and have a good time while not damaging your blades with any pesky rocks or gravel. Wow.

Friday morning we had a free practice stage provided by the (generous and safety-conscious) organizers to check out our setup in the demanding conditions. This proved to be the first of our many exercises in self-restraint, slowing down to go fast, or at least stay sort of on the road. It was impressively slick. Carl’s genius snow-tire setup (cartoonishly small and narrow Smart Car tires on donut spare tire rims) was immediately discounted when we flatted “just driving along” and bent one of the donut rims. Awesome. This meant we would switch to our four larger “normal” snow tires and hope that we didn’t flat all weekend on some ditch gnomes. Hmmm.

Friday afternoon racing started soon enough and before we knew it we were sliding slow motion through the woods, marveling at the tracks left by those on the road before us. Our time for the first stage was 9:43 over six miles. That’s slow. Travis Pastrana and Ken Block ninja’d across the ice in well under eight minutes. We suck. And how the hell did they do that? We made it though the next three stages and stopped getting smoked quite as badly before the first service and transition to night racing. During this first service we learned how the fast guys were going so fast. “Tractionizing”. What? Well, you basically take your perfectly good snow tires and run them on a roller covered in spikes. This perforates the tread, creating a “rubber shag carpet” of sorts and enabling the tire to stick to impossibly slick surfaces such as the hockey rink we were traversing every stage. We needed this technology. But we just didn’t have the time, especially after the Factory Subaru mechanics explained the hazards of the process to your car, eardrums and, possibly, face…

Rolling into Friday’s night stages Carl started to find his groove. We only slid backwards through one spectator area with the engine stalled and narrowly missed two barns and a shed. He was in a groove, all right… A completely committing ice rut that took both us and the car somewhere vaguely between the bordering hardwoods. But seriously, he was driving impressively well, looking for traction in the snowbanks and far outside the race line to make our direction changes. It was fun to watch. Which I avoided doing too often in order to keep feeding him the upcoming road information that was so absolutely necessary to have in these conditions. We were even catching some competitors on stage, as everyone around us was struggling even more… This lead to our first major error. Overtaking an impressively fast Group 5 (two-wheel-drive) Chris Duplessis (fellow Mainah) on stage we agreed at the next Arrival Time Control to take his position on the road. Pulling in on his minute instead of ours seemed totally reasonable but we would end up incurring a one-minute penalty for the improper procedure. Dang it. This frustrated me enough that I ended up adding seconds instead of minutes on the next transit and we checked in a minute early yet again. Dang it again, two minutes added to our time for not having the brain capacity of your average third-grader… No matter, Carl was holding down his end with beautifully smooth driving and we were moving up through the field, finishing the night stages, not only with an almost flat tire, but in seventh position, even with the penalties. Dang.

Our arrival was confirmed the next morning when we were promoted from the cheap seats in Parc Expose to center court, up with the big boys. Evidently we didn’t look as fast as we were… A few drivers swung by to ask insightful questions like “how are you going so fast in THAT thing?” Come on, guys, the WOT is sweet, if a little budget… We got the tires (which seemed to be holding air again) all pumped up and were ready for a full day of rallying. Twelve stages over 10 hours awaited us.

The first stage of the day was fifteen miles of county road action. Bits were sanded and we were looking to haul ass and make an impression. Evidently Andrew Comre-Picard was also making an impression in front of us. Mostly in a snowbank on a Right 5 that tightened. His co-driver (and MTB rider) Jeremy Wimpey had the tow strap out and ready when we came by a few minutes later. We made an on-the-spot decision to yank them out and got it done in 30 seconds or so. It was the least we could do, as Wimpey had been giving us lots of tips over the weekend. ACP was STOKED and welcomed us to the team, promising to help with anything we’d ever need. Which might be a lot…

The rest of the morning’s racing went smooth, Carl was still doing his thing and I was somehow not screwing up that often. We didn’t get any more penalties and solidified our seventh position while driving rad, snowbank-busting lines through the spectator areas to great cheers. There were hundreds of people out on each stage, some in the sanctioned viewing areas and many, many more just partying in their front yards that we happened to be racing past. It was pretty amazing, and maybe a bit dangerous…

Morning gave way to afternoon and things were still going smoothly when we found ourselves sliding at what would seem to be a reasonable rate into a Right 4 junction. Our seemingly reasonable speed quickly proved to be grossly excessive for the conditions and we rocketed sideways through the junction into the 2’ frozen embankment on the far side, fully expecting to do massive suspension damage in the process of rolling the car onto its roof. Somehow we just roosted out after a massive bang and seemed to have only a left front flat tire to show for it. With four icy miles left in the stage we decided to just drive it to the finish as quick as possible, KO’ing dozens of snowbanks and other miscellaneous solid objects on every right turn. Somehow the ice lubricated the tire enough that it wasn’t shredded and we did a quick change to a spare gravel rally tire. Not ideal. One more conservatively driven (on account of gravel tires being made of plastic, not glue) stage and we were at service, ready to cash in a favor from ACP. In lieu of any more spare snow tires we elected to see if the flat would re-inflate and hold air. It miraculously did and we were on our way to the final three night stages, back in “Eagle Eyes” Decker’s domain, prepared to fend off the charge from the three Polish teams in really expensive looking cars who trailed us. It wasn’t a problem.

Seventh place overall and solid “Best of the Rest”. It’s probably not even worth mentioning that Travis Pastrana used his amazingly precise driving and setup to beat our 2:58 ET by 27 minutes. Ouch. What mattered is that we were alive and the car was still drive-able and ready to race in Missouri at the end of February. Byron and Sky did an impressively good job as well, finishing ninth overall and third in the Super Production category with a car that also appeared to be completely healthy. High five, team Oregon!

We totally made it into the Rally America Live Coverage
http://www.rally-america.com/events/144/news/liveupdates/

But not the YouTube videos…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AclNaYw-gkw&feature=channel