holy crap, sunday blew my mind! the vancouver mini cooper club's fall rally was awesome; definitely one of the most organized car events i've been to, and just a rockin' good time.
so lora and i showed up at nine, and one of the volunteers handed me a key to a purple 05 mini cooper straight off the bat. went through tech no problem, picked up the route book and ran it out to lora so she could start calculating times, etc. after the driver's meeting, went out and started the car and off we went!
the rally was a TSD rally (time-speed-distance), so it wasn't about going fast.
it was about precision driving: being at the right place at the right time doing the right speed. this is A LOT harder than it sounds! for every second you are late or early arriving at a checkpoint, you get a point for that stage -- so the whole thing is about being there ON TIME. at first, we were a little unorganized and couldn't figure out how to clear the odo and hadn't really synced to the race clock. but after about half an hour, lora and i hit this awesome pace through pitt meadows, maple ridge and then in mission. had one little hiccup where we read the speed limit directions wrong, but that meant in order to catch up i had to, ahem, do a thorough performancing and handling test of all windy roads with sharp corners. muahahahaa...
the end result: Lora and i came in 14th out of 59 cars, and took home the plaque for top media team.
for those interested, here's the breakdown of our scores. (E means early, L means late, time in seconds)
Car 5: Simone Blais and Lora Danyluk
Pitt Meadows stage: 81 points
C1: 36E, 35 points
C2: 25L, 24 points
C2: 23E, 22 points
Maple Ridge stage: 92 points
C1: 12E, 11 points
C2: 47L, 46 points
C3: 36E, 35 points
Mission stage 1: 50 points
C1: 13E, 12 poitns
C2: 2L, 1 point
C3: 38L, 37 points
Mission stage 2: 92 points
C1: 73L, 72 points (this was the point where we were doing 27.5 km-h, instead of 45)
C2: 15E, 14 points
C3: 7E, 6 points
TOTAL: 315
so yeah. love the new minis, and definitely researching how to get into rally racing!
