Okay, lads! I have just heard from my TSD navigator, Russ Kraushaar, about
his adventures in the Mount Hood rally, a full-on stage rally-with
motorcycles?!-near Portland. His account almost-ALMOST!-makes me want to get
back into the full-on stand-on-it rally game, so I thought you might enjoy
it, too.

Next up for the two of us is the Totem Rally in BC in November, I think,
most likely in my Saab Sonett. Those brisk Canadian gravel rallies may not
be full-speed stage rallies, but they keep my adrenaline circulating. As the
say about Totem, "Winter roads with summer ditches." And as Peter Fox (I
think) once put it, "Remember, for every mile of road, there's two miles of
ditches!"

Satch Carlson
______________________________

Satch:

We had a great weekend on the mountain! Garth Ankeny and I finished 9th
overall and second in class to a much faster Honda CRX Si at the Mt. Hood
Rally. We started the event near the tail end of the field, but the very
twisty stages meant our 1970 Saab 96, with its meager 70 or so horsepower at
the front wheels, could run fairly close to more powerful entries. I've
already learned that Garth will drive faster if the car is letting him down
mechanically and pissing him off. (He tried to break it and failed on one
event. Sounds a little scary, but it was fun!) This weekend I learned he
will drive it just as hard if you re-seed him from the tail end to the
middle of the pack among the faster cars. We moved up about six positions on
the re-seed. then overtook the PGT class Subaru 2.5RS ahead of us in the
final results. With a few more stages in the dark and/or dust, we might have
caught the Open Class car ahead of them as well!

This is one of the few events that allows recce. I really dig recce! I feel
like I'm contributing to the effort rather than reading notes that either
distract or slow the driver for cautions. Too often I'm just chattering
ballast with a timepiece for getting us into controls on time. For this
event, we spent Friday driving the stages in Garth's Saab 95 wagon at no
more than 35 mph; they don't allow rally cars on stages during recce.
(Something about putting a driver in a car with a cage makes a 35-mph speed
limit impossible to maintain.) The process goes like this: Garth describes
every inch of the stage: the length of any straight sections in yards, the
direction of each corner-right or left-the severity of the corner from 1 to
6 (hairpin to very fast), and any other important characteristics like
corners we can cut and those we shouldn't-and places we wouldn't want to
find ourselves testing the strength of the roll cage. I takes notes as
quickly as possible.

We try to keep an even speed, without stopping, to assure consistency. Then
we drive the stages a second time with me reading the notes back to him
looking for any corrections we should make.

The result is pretty exciting. We blast off on the live stages Saturday with
me reading one or two corners ahead, depending on how quickly the corners
follow one another, and Garth drives the wheels off the car. It's very
gratifying to know the driver is going into blind corners as fast as he can,
trusting that what you've told him will come next is true. This, of course,
can work against you in a bad way if you should get lost in your notes or
turn two pages instead of one. . . . When this happens (and it does) it's
best for me to keep quiet until I can positively identify where we're at in
my notes.

We're just after 1:00 minute into this video---the red Saab 96 #439:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ov_tazEYbw
The car that beat us in class is the very fast white-and-black CRX near the
beginning of the video.

There are some great shots at
http://www.pdxsports.com/photos/showindex.asp?folder=2008MtHood
The other Saab 96 (the white one #296) is one of Garth's customers, Cliff
Johannsen. Garth did the mechanical work prepping the car. This was its
first venture into the woods.

You can find results here:
http://www.mthoodrally.com/2008/

Life is good!

Russ Kraushaar