Another event come and gone, I can not believe the weekend went by so fast!
For those of you who don't know (or remember) from my previous posts, I co-drive for Team Hardyboy Racing in the Canadian Rally Championship as well as the Western Canada Rally Championship. Last weekend was the Pacific Forest Rally, a two pass recce event featuring stages like the infamous Princeton Cut-off (its really not that scary, its only a couple hundred meter drop on the co-driver's side of the car. Piece of cake)!
Going into the event, we needed to win P4 (PGT for all you USA guys) in order to have a solid chance at winning P4 nationally. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be due to a timing error on my part as well as losing over 50 seconds on the final 2 stages of the event due to dust issues. Hardy Schmidtke (team owner/driver) also does not have the best night vision, so the odds were already stacked against us.
The first 6 stages went well enough, but competing on new to us roads in the dimming light was not the best way to start off our battle. Our competition, Warren Currie, slowly slipped ahead to over a 50 second lead. To add insult to injury, I managed to check in 8 minutes late at what I had thought was a re-group, instead it being a manual time control (early arrival and declaration of time in allowed). Silly me 
Late penalties are assessed at 10 seconds per minute. I wrote an inquiry due to the fact that I was actually waiting in the huge throng of people checking in early (I've never been one to body check people out of the way for much). But alas, my strategy has been forced to change. Make sure you get out of the way 
Saturday morning came much too quickly. Relatively speaking, 10:00am is a VERY late start to any day of rallying but I will complain nonetheless. Sure made life easy though. After running over the game plan with the service crew on what tires we wanted when, as well as fuelling, Hardy and I hit the stages. While the first 4 stages of the day were status quo for our speed, we really turned up the heat on Nicola North and Nicola South (SS 15/16). You would never guess that Hardy was a rally-car driver during his time off if you met him face to face, but there is a burning desire to go faster in him that sometimes shows. This was one of those moments, as we set a blistering pace placing 3rd overall stage times on the North and South sections. I consider this quite an achievement, considering the competition of Gord Olsen and Warren Currie chasing closely.
Finally, onto the last stages. Helmer South ran twice in a row (a 1/4 of the total stage mileage in the final two stages with no service). Helmer is your typical fast paced flowing rally road that bottle necks down in the middle to lots of R3's and L3's. I am trying to pick a Rally America event that it would be similar to, but I have not participated enough in that series to describe it. Fatigue was setting in, along with darkness on the stage. The first run through was not bad, but Hardy was having difficulty digesting notes he was hearing while I got lost once. We did not have to use lights yet, but dusk was settling fast. Warren Currie set a blistering pace 25 seconds faster then us. The regional portion of the event (the whole of the second day) was slowly slipping through our grasp. After transiting back to the start of the stage for the final go, we fired up the lights and made sure we were ready. Right off the start, I knew there were going to be issues. No wind was in sight, causing dust patches to magically hang in the middle of the road completely obscuring vision. Coupled with the night around us, we slowed on the second pass by just under a minute. Warren beat us again, securing his 5th place overall nationally and 4th overall regionally. Hardy and I were right behind in 6th overall nationally and 5th overall regionally. The worst of it all was we won 7/10 stages in the regional against Warren; it just was not enough to defend against Helmer. Another issue (I did not notice, but it must have been in his mind) was we had crashed on Helmer, DNF'ing our first rally ever back in June at the Mountain Trials rally. I am sure this played in Hardy's mind, as I was very, VERY aware of the exact bank we hit each time we went by.
So, another overall successful rally weekend for the team. We currently are 8th overall in the national championship, 2nd overall in the regional. While originally our plans did not include going to the Rally of the Tall Pines (November 20-22) if we did not win our class at PFR, plans change. Now we are going, so expect us to maintain our top 10 national overall. The finale of the WCRC is the Kananaskis Rally in 2 weeks (November 8-9), with us needing to place not more then one place behind Warren Currie or Zebe Szewczyk in order to maintain our 2nd overall. We technically could win 1st overall regionally if we came first and Gord Olsen didn't finish, but I doubt that will happen.
Thanks for listening/reading everyone. Here are the pictures I have so far!
