Copied from the relevant 'FTO motorsport' thread on
www.ftowa.com... in case you're interested in how the motorkhana comp is going!
ROUND 4 - May 9th, 2005
The weather... oh boy, the weather.
Today was without doubt the most challenging and demanding day I've ever spent behind the wheel. Even more so than that night in 1987 when I had to drive four drunk idiots around in an unfamiliar car as they played AC/DC and mooned the police.
Anyway.....................
We were running in the afternoon. I got there around 11:30 to be faced with a wall of water falling from the heavens. And those poor morning session drivers were out there, fording their way through standing water, wipers on full, fogging up and generally having a very interesting time!!
I should have brought an outboard motor!!
The first session was running really late, so our start was delayed. In retrospect, this was a blessing in disguise... the rain slowly started to clear up for us after the third run. By the end of the day, the very top part of the track was getting dry(ish).
All of us Captain Chaos drivers were looking pretty iffy about this. Firing yourself around a tight track, with a couple of unfamiliar courses, in conditions that looked more like the Avon Descent whitewater challenge...? Oh right, we do this for Sunday fun, do we? Suuuure....!
My first run after the 'warmup' Challenge 0 wasn't great. I was working so hard at seeing where I was going, trying to hear/feel the tyres at work (or not), etc. I wigged out for a second and the car got ahead of me. Faced with going the wrong way past where I should have turned in, I decided to just run over the relevant traffic cone instead of going around it. Sounds dumb, but a 'wrong way' is slowest time of everyone out there, plus 5 seconds - but driving over a cone is just 'plus 5 seconds'.
So I was still in there, but with a cone under the car. It dropped out a second or two later. I was close to finishing my run when I came across that same damn cone again. The suicidal little bugger was sitting smack in the middle of the final corner entry. So, go around it, or ignore it?
I wiped it from my vision, and just tackled the corner as normal. And ignored the huge *WHACK* as it shot up under the car once more. This time it hitched a lift all the way back to the garage. Some nice bloke pulled it out, and I took it all the way back to its rightful place. Coney's Big Adventure was over.
I wasn't the only one having trouble. There were quite a number of wrong ways and +5 from all teams participating. Our 'Captain Chaos' team had our fair share. Leigh got crossed up on the same course I had trouble, and Andrew got lost somewhere between the "Deep Impact" tsunami and the humpback whale pool. Andrew, who was standing in for Nick, must have wondered just what he'd got himself in for!
After a bad start, we decided to press on and just do our utmost to post some clean times. And avoid drowning. Gradually, we pulled it together and posted some half-decent times.
We ended up running 4th out of the 6 teams in the afternoon session. We won't know where we stand overall for a couple of weeks though. Having said that, it was great to know that we'd done Hell Day at MC's - and lived. No damage, no crashes, no mechanical failures. And I for one learned a whole lot... it's been almost a year since the last time I drove in the wet at MC Motorsport. With winter finally upon us now, it was good to find those wet road skills still buried somewhere in the old brain!
- Rich
PS. I've just found out that the fall I had the day before Round 4 comp resulted in a broken rib.
No wonder it hurt like hell when I got into that 4-point harness and did seven courses of MC challenges!
I didn't know it was broken, honest!
Is that dumb or what? No, wait, don't answer that.
