Rich River 2008

[Matt]

Originally Posted by Tortfeaser

Culture stop.

[Matt]

Originally Posted by Tortfeaser

Ready to rumble rich river stylee

[jamar]

so many "wrong's" make it right - go the datsun lurrve

[claude]

No vinyl roof ??

Ya slippin swill....

[TKM Jnr]

Just got a call from the Girlfriend. Asked how the Canberra crew were going. Apperently Fro did a G'box and Swill was just stopped. Unlucky Guys

Good luck to Swill + Tort. Hope you can fix the car to drive it home!!

[grahamthompson]

Unofficial scores posted on the HRA Yahoo website show winner as Dinta and Kate Officer Galant down 18 points, by 1 point to the Upton Laidley P510.
Swill and Tort finished 21st o/r down 93 points; Fro and Winton retired in stage 6 with a blown clutch.

[tortfeaser]

Damn HRA crazy timing. Stuffed if I know how you can interpret the NRC so that entering a control in your due minute can be early 'cos you left the last control at so many seconds past the minute. Equals lots (3) of early penalties for us, and a heap across the whole field. You'd be sitting outside the control waiting for the minute to tick over, and then get billed for being early.

Kind of took the gloss of an otherwise tops event. Really good for a newbie navigator (as opposed to codriver) to get into, not too tough. The wet and muddy bits were really muddy, so the B took a big hit from a stump to the front, but miraculously missed both the radiator and from tearing the suspension out. Whacked it right on the end of the rail. Reconnect the coil and go. THat was the first forest stage, just had the wrong attitude. Suitably readjusted we went on for the finish, and got there. Great forests, nicely signed stages, some fun navigation, some hard driving, and some top company from competitors and officials. Props to the nuts in a Hillman Minx on whitewall crossplys, and to the massive numbers of Pug dudes. One of which seemed to be both navigating and driving, and would overtake us three times a stage. They'd go past, get lost, then come back and have another go. Rinse, repeat.

Road tyres are really not the rubber of choice for black silt mud, and 15 hours in a B to and from Echuca from Canberra doesn't do a lot for the lower back. Thanks for the ride Swill, I had a ball. And the whole weekend was tops too, traffic jams in Wagga, national glass gallery that was a bit pissweak, the national holden museum that contained two camiras and more bogan trinkets than I thought existed, and Winton B's Rutherglen wineries tour. Good company from Matt S, Fro, Winton and Swill.

[DaveTrees]

Originally Posted by tortfeaser

Damn HRA crazy timing. Stuffed if I know how you can interpret the NRC so that entering a control in your due minute can be early 'cos you left the last control at so many seconds past the minute. Equals lots (3) of early penalties for us, and a heap across the whole field. You'd be sitting outside the control waiting for the minute to tick over, and then get billed for being early.

Tort

I will explain in more detail when I get a chance .... but in a nutshell, each leg between vias in the daylight during the daylight (which were passage controls) were independent of each other.

If your in/out time at a passage was (say) 15:10:40 and the time allowed for the next leg was 10 mins, you were therefore due at the next passage at 15:20:40 (not 15:20:00 or 15:21:00). If you arrived at 15:20:55, you would still be regarded as "on time", because you were still in your due minute.

Yout start time for the next leg would then be 15:20:55 ... and so on.

If you had arrived at 15:20:38, you would be in the preceding minute, therefore get a 1 minute penalty for being 1 minute (or part thereof) early.

Maintained Average Speed type sections are hard to get your head around, until you get used to them.

There's nothing in the NRC that says a start time has to be on a "whole minute" !

Read the Supp Regs & Furthers carefully ... it was explained in there.

[Jimmy]

Originally Posted by DaveTrees

Tort

I will explain in more detail when I get a chance .... but in a nutshell, each leg between vias in the daylight during the daylight (which were passage controls) were independent of each other.

If your in/out time at a passage was (say) 15:10:40 and the time allowed for the next leg was 10 mins, you were therefore due at the next passage at 15:20:40 (not 15:20:00 or 15:21:00). If you arrived at 15:20:55, you would still be regarded as "on time", because you were still in your due minute.

Yout start time for the next leg would then be 15:20:55 ... and so on.

If you had arrived at 15:20:38, you would be in the preceding minute, therefore get a 1 minute penalty for being 1 minute (or part thereof) early.

Maintained Average Speed type sections are hard to get your head around, until you get used to them.

There's nothing in the NRC that says a start time has to be on a "whole minute" !

Read the Supp Regs & Furthers carefully ... it was explained in there.

Geez it would be a bugger to have an in/out time of say 15:10:59!! If you had 10 minutes to the next via you would be due at 15:20:59...so 15:20:58 and you're "1 min" early and 15:21:00 and your "1 min" late....takes a bit of thinking/planning doesn't it....

[MarkH]

I'm a dill ignore me

[tortfeaser]

The Apocalypse!!One11! is a bit second hand now. Pretty happy to be first road-tyred car home.

EDIT: pic too big. Hit the link.

http://picasaweb.google.com/YRALLY/R...56781958080098

[DaveTrees]

In retrospect (not so much at times during it !) I really enjoyed the event.

The daylight touring stuff was fun (except for Via 5, which we never did get to .... the compass was playing up badly & I couldnt find our way out of a big blank bit on the map !). Copped a 10 point penalty for that, plus 1 min late at Via6. Got the rest of it OK though.

Loved the "letterbox via". Sent the driver to do Postie duty (seeing I had a lapful of maps etc) & Kim had the brilliant idea of climbing the dead tree by the side of the road to scan the area ... spotted the letterbox immediately & we were out of there way quicker than most.

I didn't cover myself with glory early in the night sections (missed a change of map scale from 1:50,000 to 1:31,680 between 2 sections so all my scaling was wrong!) & dropped 10 mins on one section. Other than that, had a pretty trouble free run - the Escort loves that twisty stuff, & Kim drove great as sual.

Tried to pick the tree we DNF'ed against in the BP (hence the name "Harper's Demise" given to the last section) but there were too many possible candidates !!

Given my stuff-ups, was very happy to end up with provisionally 4th O/R & 1st Post-Historic. We might have given 3rd O/R a shake without my errors, but wouldnt have caught Alan & Mark or the Officers anyway I don't think.

Thanks to Steuart and the team for another top event.

PS : Rick Hartmann equipped our car with a GPS transponder/recorder .... will be intersesting (& potentially embarassing !) to download the file to Google Earth & see exactly were we went ....

[tortfeaser]

So Dave, will the results have what we missed & what we got?

Did you do the challenge? How'd you go? We found them all, but took 32 mins (!) to do 8km.

[razoo]

Well that was an interesting weekend in the sunny (!) climes of Echuca. Apart from the odd drop of rain the RR ran in overcast but fine conditions.

After last year's effort of stump smashing I was determined to finish without scratching the car and by and large did that.

The average speed section was well.. average as we hadn't got to grips with the to the second timing so dropped a few early penalties and some lateness in the Terrick forest where we joined in the ceremonial milling between via 7 and 8. The letterbox at via 9 was my job as Carol had a lapful of paperwork so after reading the redirection I leapt out and stumbled through the trees in an approx NE direction. Gotta use one of these letterbox vias myself one day as it's a big laugh.

Arriving at Cohuna with no problems other than dropping a bit of time we got some takeaway hamburgers and checked over the Galant at the car park.
Of course despite the checks the driving lights didn't work on the transport as the earth lead was loose to the relay.

The first night section told us we shouldn't have got said hamburgers as even I felt the slightest queasiness in the first 1 km of the twisty forest road; and I NEVER get car sick. After 2 km I could hear Carol breathing deeply and thought Oh oh I'd better slow down. She said she was OK but around Via 3 I heard her breath deeply again and pulled over so she could go and visit Ralph. Once back in the car we trundled along so she could regain her composure. Damn hamburger I'm sure. We got to the spectator point and I thought the road surface was very loose which it was but another 3 or 4 km further down the road I heard the rear left making some noise so had to stop to change the flat. This gave Carol a breather but still couldn't go too fast (not a straight road in sight) until towards the end of the section. Lost 44 minutes but Ralph stayed away.

It was straight into another competitive so no respite and Carol managed to navigate us through that one and the following shorter one so we got to the service at Barmah where Luke and Alexander were waiting. One of the driving lights had blown a globe so we changed that and did a quick check before heading off to the final two sections.

The way Stuart had laid out the rally meant that these last two sections were more driver oriented although there was some navigation involved. But following Fence track and Boyson Rd was a no-brainer and we had a good run, catching Jaimie in the Starion just before the end of Fence track.

The last section was good and bad with numerous muddy holes to negotiate but a simple enough run to the finish.

We skipped the Challenge section and headed back to the Bridge Hotel for a beer and something to eat.

As I said earlier my plan was to finish in one piece but those damn RR stumps still managed to sneak up on me when we had to reverse to see a road sign and I hit the rear bumper on one that I'm sure snuck out into the middle of the road after we went past.

Provisional scores show we're second to last (ha ha just like the BP) but excellent fun, a bit of an adventure, and plenty of driving across and through varied terrain, never a moment's boredom.

Thanks to Stuart and his team for all those caution signs on bridges, the accurate instructions and we look forward to the next Big Cohuna.

Geoff

[Swill]

A top weekend had by all. Its the craziest thing I've done in a car in a long time. Its a completely different mindset to a SS rally. Which was something I didn't really understand until I used the stump as a brake in the first night stage. Thanks Fro for getting out and helping with a bit of a push to get if off and running again. Usually in a rally I just drive as fast as possible and don't listen to the big fella all that much. But in these things its the team work that gets you through to the end no so much the speed.

Highlights for me were:
*getting back to the fine art of "Horobins Dog" Its been too long between drinks since the last taste of Datsun driving exellence.
*The whole road trip. 15 hours to and from an event in a car that you compete in is living the dream
* Putting a few names to faces on a few blokes off the forum.
* The officials. Some real funny moments in the forest in the middle off the night. 1st at the passage control where 2 or 3 blokes were having a good couple of minutes disscussing what time they should give us and Marc's encouragement to hurry up a touch 2nd the blokes at the start of a stage that forgot that we were there, so I had to wind down the window and sing out " I reckon we've got 15 seconds to go? Is that alright by you guys?" cracked us up a bit
* Matty Searles ability to drink coke. If I had a doller for bottle he drank id be up $27.
* The Jesus sing on the highway. I Almost ran of the road laughing
* Road tyres WTF was I thinking there
* positive camber WTF was think there
* standard seats WTF was i thinking there

I now have to stick the B on the rack and pull the wood out of the front and she'll be ready to go again. The Apocolpse will ride again