PFR Results - Quick Summary

Well...it was an intense event. A Blizzard rolled into the mountains and covered 3 of the stages in snow. 2 of the stages had to be cancelled since 3 competitors ended up going off the road during recce and no trucks could even get to them. We were able to finish Recce but had some hairy moments on the gravel tires (the only ones we brought with us).

We finished 14th of 26 regional competitors for the Friday night stages. I am pretty happy with that result since I've never ran those stages before, had a new co-driver, and were running on pace notes that we wrote (also a first for me) and, as a result, were not pushing. The Princeton Cutoff stages were CRAZY with huge exposures, ruts, and rocks (my skid plate has some new dents). Also, the Friday stages did not count towards the WCRC points, and were essentially ran for fun by the regional competitors so no point breaking the car. Something like 6-8 cars didn't finish the Friday stages (including 1 roll over).

Saturday went mostly well for us. Because 2 stages had been cancelled, the organizers decided to run the other snow covered stage an extra 2 times in the morning. We found out about this at 8:30 on Saturday morning. I ran into Canadian Tire when they opened at 9 and bought 4 Goodyear Nordic snow tires and 4 rims (I should have bought the ones available in the Classified forum before leaving). They had them mounted for me by 9:45, our start time was something like 10:24. Because we're relatively new to rally, we were seeded as 26 of 32 cars. Even though we took it easy on the first stage (covered in snow) we passed 3 cars over the 23kms. We knocked another 40 seconds off our time the 2nd time through. At that point we were running 9th of 26. We had 5 gravel stages through the afternoon and slipped to 12th. We gained back one position on the 2nd last stage (back onto the snow again) knocking a minute off our time from the first time through - but we had a puncture near the end of the stage. We got the tire changed and made it to the time control on time for the last stage. We decided on the start line not too push again and take our 11th place finish. About 5kms from the end we punctured another of the snow tires and had to finish the stage with the flat...losing about 2.5minutes from the previous time through. The tire was smoking when we got to the finish, I thought for a second that it might be on fire. We then had to wait for the next VW to come that had a spare for us to borrow so that we could get back to the finish control. We took 1m:10s in penalties for arriving late to the finish, bumping us to 14th.

So..it was a finish and the car isn't broken. 3rd finish of 4 rallies...not too bad, but I really would have liked that 11th place. Also, we were making good time on our last stage before the puncture, and a top 10 wasn't out of the question. I'm a bit dissapointed, but I guess that's what I get for using Goodyear Nordics in a rally. 4 new tires and rims, 2 punctures and 1 wrecked rim.

Lessons learned...1) when using cheap snow tires on 2 passes of a 23kms rough stage, take 2 spares. 2) We could have put snow tires on the front and gravels on the back for the last 2 passes through the snow stage. We knew that the stage was getting chewed up pretty good, and only the 1st half was snow (stage starts high and loses elevation).

I'll post more later...very tired now after 17hour drive home. I also had a video camera in the car this time and got some great footage, will post up some video when I get it edited and sorted.

Lastly...Thanks so much to John Hall, my co-driver for the event. John and I made a great team, I think, except he likes it really cold in the car and I like to run the heater non stop :). John did a great job with the pace notes, but more importantly he kept me grounded during the event, constantly reminding me to not take risks and finish the rally. As he put it "first learn to finish, then learn to finish first".