Thursday (10/20/2005)

Transit to Lake Superior Pro Rallies

Once again it is rally season! For most rallists their calendar year revolves around the one weekend that everyone looks forward to all summer long, the weekend of Lake Superior Pro Rally. Formerly called the Press On Regardless (POR) rally, the Lake Superior Pro Rally is the fierce competition at the final round of the rally championship season. The roads range from smooth and fast, to tight, twisty and ROUGH! Surfaces range from sand, to slippery clay, to asphalt, all in the same stage! It is THE rally that most challenges rally drivers and cars each season.

The Dodge ShadowRally Team competed this weekend in the two divisional Regional Rally races that run in conjunction with their bigger brother on the national circuit. The weekend breaks down into two separate rallies for the Club racers. Friday we competed in 6 special stages for a total of about 40 stage miles through the state forests south of Houghton near Baraga, MI. Saturday was a fresh start and a second club rally that ran 8 stages north of Houghton, in the Keweenaw Peninsula. The ShadowRally team had a great weekend, finishing 2nd in Group 5 both days!

This weekend was especially fun because our service crew consisted of my Mom, my girlfriend Torie, and my sister-in-law Fabie. This was Fabie's first rally and Torie's second. All the girls seem to have had a great time together and did an awesome job of running service for the ShadowRally team!

The rally activity started earlier that week. The rally car, service truck, and trailer left Detroit on Wednesday 10/19/05 so that mom and dad could take their time getting up to Houghton. Unfortunately, Torie, Fabie, and myself had work Thursday, so we were forced to leave Thursday afternoon. 4:00pm is a bad time to start the 10-hour drive to Houghton. It was a late night, but the VW turbo Beetle got good gas mileage and had PLENTY of power to pass trucks (or slow cars) in the UP!

Friday (10/21/05)

Ottawa Regional Rally

Friday morning we were up early to register and get the car tech-inspected. We were cleared to run by about 10:00am Friday morning without major issues. A few final adjustments and checks to the car, then we were ready to head to the parc expose.

As always, we were feeling the pre-race jitters, but once we were in the car with the gas pedal smashed to the floor, everything just felt right! We started 34th on the road out of 62 total competitors, in the club and national rallies combined. We started out at a brisk pace, but with the idea that we NEEDED to finish. We were the highest ranked seed 8 vehicle in the competition and needed just one more race finish to bump us out of seed 8 and into higher rally America drivers standings.

Friday was an abbreviated rally with only 42 stage miles due to the loss of road use permissions in the national forests. About half way through the Friday night stages we started hearing a loud thud from the right front corner of the car. We inspected at service and found that the strut-to-knuckle connection blots had come loose! Around every corner the wheel was shifting from full negative to full positive camber. Luckily, the wheel had not fallen off and we were able to re-torque the connection bolts and head off into the woods for another set of stages.
We ran our own rally Friday night. Jake and Matt Himes were in a heated battle with Mark Utecht and Rob Bohn for the lead in Group 5. Since we were not running pace notes and were on all used tires, we simply were not fast enough to run with Utecht and Himes. We were slowly building a lead over the McCleerys in their newly re-vamped 5.0 liter Ford X14ti in the fight for third place.

Toward the end of the night Utecht had an issue with the Mustang and we advanced up to second place in G5 behind Jake and Matt Himes. We were excited to be in second place. We worked the rest of the night to not make any mistakes and hold on to our position. There were no other big incidents on Friday night, just good, fast, consistent racing! We finished 52.6 seconds behind Himes in first and 1 minute 53.4 seconds ahead of McCleery in third, for a solid 2nd place G5 finish!

Saturday (10/22/05)

Auto Value Keweenaw Regional Rally

On Saturday, the club racers scores start fresh with the start of a new rally, the Auto Value Keweenaw Rally, that runs north of Houghton. This rally included many of the popular and historic stages of years past. The first stage of the day was Gratiot Lake. Gratiot is a road that has two faces. Gratiot Lake starts out fast, relatively smooth and fluid. Most drivers will drive the first few miles of Gratiot with a rhythm that will allow the car to "link", a slide from one corner to the next. About half way through the stage, things change. The road gets slippery, more clay than sand, and very rough in places with HARD bottomed water holes and BIG rocks!

Drivers must make a conscious recognition of these condition changes in Gratiot and slow down to avoid sliding off the road or damaging their vehicle. The ShadowRally team learned this the hard way in 2004 when we blew up a transaxle when we landed on a rock off of a jump! This year we were set to beat the Gratiot stage and not let it beat us!

We ran well on Gratiot and ended up with the third fastest G5 time on stage, 32.2 seconds behind Himes in the RX-7 and 6.5 seconds behind the Mitsubishi Eclipse of Kowalski and Sawicki. The rest of the day consisted of three runs through Delaware, a run up Brockway Mountain, along with other classic stages.

On the next set of stages we started hearing a loud thud from the left front corner when we traveled over bumps. We suspected the strut top bushing was blown out. At service we confirmed that the rubber isolator had been destroyed and the top of the strut was banging against the inside of the strut tower every time we landed hard or hit a big bump. We figured that if the bushing completely blew out it would just make lots of noise, but the wheel should not fall off, so we pressed on.

During the afternoon stages we noticed a loud klunk-klunl-klunk coming from the rear left wheel. We had cracked a brake rotor. Luckily we were on our way to service and we were able to change the rotor and brake pads before any more stages were run.

After five stages and with three to go, we had slipped back to third place, 7.3 seconds behind Kowalski and Sawicki in second. We put on the best-used tires we had and ran the wheels off the Shadow for the last three stages! We went from being 7.3 seconds behind to 48.2 seconds ahead of Kowalski through the last three stages!! Our "secret weapon", a reversed set of very directionally worn front tires had helped us CRUSH the last 3 stages!! We finished second in group 5 for the second day in a row! Again we were excited about our good performance and are looking forward to the Sno*Drift rally in January!

Photos by permission from On A Limb Racing