About these pictures:
I have been wanting to try out RallyCrossing for a long time. Finally on Oct 24, 2004 I took the plunge and did my first one. Man was it a blast!! I think the RallyCross was the most fun thing I have done in at least a year!!!
For those of you that don't know what RallyCrossing is, it's a competition where a dirt course is set up in a large area and normal "street" cars compete to get through the course in the quickest time. Usually the area is free of any large objects that could cause any major damage to the cars.
The rain and mud
On this particular day, it had been raining all night and was still raining when we started. This meant there was mud everywhere. Before starting the competiton they had a drive through, where you aren't competing, but just driving through the course to get a feel for where to go. Well this is where I found out just how slippery the mud can be. My car has All Wheel Drive, and I've driven in snow that was so deep the front bumper was acting like a snow plow, and I was fine. But this was totally different. The muddy course was the most slippery thing I had ever driven on. On this drive through I barely made it through the course. This was going to be an interesting race, to say the least....
The first run
On my first run of the race, I was planning on just taking it easy and making my way through the course, trying to find the braking points, slippery parts, etc. I was doing fairly well until I got to a long, off camber corner near the spectator area. I started sliding off to the side where there was a bunch of tires marking the course. I instinctivly hit the brakes, and locked up the wheels and stalled the engine. Thanks to the hill that I was on, I kept sliding down towards the tires. When my car finally came to a stop, I was right up against the tires. I restarted the engine and tried pulling forward with the steering wheel turned, but I was just spinning my tires and going nowhere. So I threw it into reverse, but noticed the car running behind me had caught up to me. They red-flagged the course and I was able to back up and get moving again. The rest of the course was uneventful until I got past the finish line. There was a big hill going up to the timing table, and I took the start of the hill too slowly. I spun my tires the whole way up the hill and barely made it up to the top. Time for my first run was 6 mins 6 seconds. A good time for this course in the dry would be a minute and a half....yeah it was really slippery out there...
Second Run
The second time I took off, I was keeping in mind the corner where I had trouble before. I was trying to not spin out, but also pick up some speed. I had a couple of close moments where I almost slid right off the course but was doing OK. When I got to the same corner where I had trouble before, I took it really slow and tried to stay way to the inside to prevent from doing the same mistake over again. As I got half way through the course, my front end started sliding outwards towards the tires again. Try as I might, I ended up stuck against the tires again just like before. ARRRG!! Well this time I threw it into reverse quickly, floored it backwards, and got going again in the right direction. The rest of the course went well until I got to the finish line. The finish line was on a bit of a hill and as I approached it, my front end started to slide out sideways......to be continued......Picture Gallery
Indexer version 1.9 copyright Corrie Wolfe 2004
