We competed in the Coast To Coast TSD Rally on Vancouver Island in the Novice class. The briskly-paced rally featured approximately 550 miles of almost entirely gravel stages.

We have not competed in many rallies of this type where precision and accuracy is the name of the game.

Due to the sheer milage and terrain we felt it would be an ideal shakedown for the as-yet largly untested Performance Rally car. We did shake a few things loose and really got a handle on the car was handling. Mission accomplished!

As far as the competition aspect of the rally–I’ll say this: It is a lot to absorb in a short period of time, it is a very steep learning curve and is one of those ‘harder than it looks” things. The first day we struggled with many aspects, but had a good time and really learned on how we should be doing it.

After discussing our plan of attack for the next day we were able to vastly improve our accuracy. Our biggest problem was that we underestimated the impact of slower speed corners on our average speed. We were experiencing problems with our rally computer (which has since been replaced) that would have helped us in that regard. Dad also mastered how to calculate time vs. speed vs. distance ‘checkpoints’ to validate our pace. The result was a 10-fold reduction in penalties, which was great. If we compete in this type of event again we’ll know what we’re doing and hopefully be (more) competitive

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Rally. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.