So, Stage 4, driving down a steep, densely forested hill in a treacherous mix of snow, dirt and shockingly greasy mud, my right hand snags the intercom wire running to my helmet. In the thrashing, one of the speakers gets ripped from my ear and wedged against my cheek.
I've got two ears, so this isn't a critical problem. I discharge just two neurons to deal with the situation. After a brief deliberation, they order my right arm to toss the wire over my shoulder where it's less likely to get tangled. But in so doing, my arm is now late to the handbrake when the 14 billion neurons still working on staying out of the trees order it to make a quick yank. The error slowly resolves itself as I watch the trees approach out the side window.
Sentras have surprisingly soft rear fenders, so the contact is so gentle, Amar never notices. We lose virtually no time, and the car still has one taillight. This is fate's warning shot.
Lesson number three: Manage your brainIn the heat of the stage, your brain gets into an amazing groove where it takes inputs and turns them into action with little or no interference from you. This leaves your higher brain functions free for scanning the road further ahead,planning two and three turn combinations, and wandering off the topic. In your first few rallies, the free part of your brain is occupied, thinking "Wow. I'm rallying. Look at this! Holy shit, I can't believe how cool I am!" Put a few dozen rallies behind you, though, and even this insanity can start to feel routine. You can be listening to "Crest, 40 into left 4, opens, then tightens to 3 minus, don't cut," working the steering, brakes, throttle, hand brake and shifter to translate that into one spectacular stream of jumps, slides and harrowing near-misses, and your brain will simultaneously be wondering if you packed enough socks for tomorrow and thinking that when you get home you should hurry up and make some pasta before that sauce you bought expires.
This can be very dangerous.
Slowing down to avoid crashes and ensure a finish doesn't make this situation any better. As you turn down the pace, more and more of your brain loses interest and wanders off. The trick is to come up with useful things for your brain to do that still help the cause.
Saturday's terrain is mostly dry gravel and I spend most of the day running seventh on the road. When only six cars have gone ahead of you, you can read their tracks and get a better idea of where the fast line is. I assign part of my brain to watch the tracks, and another part to make sure I don't follow the leaders into anything unnecessarily aggressive. Unchecked, I'd put the inside front tire right on the edge of the road every time-or even off the road, if that seemed faster. That's where the big rocks are, though, and I've ended more than one rally that way. Hell, I've almost ended road trips that way.
Another part of my brain tries to figure out where snow will be. This turns out to be exceptionally useful. Scanning the memory banks, the snow search part of my brain remembers the weather always gets colder as you get closer to the edge of the Grand Canyon. With the canyon on the right, it remembers the sun is always to the south, so the south wall of the canyon is always in shade. Any piece of road shaded by a cliff on the left will also have been in the shade all day. That's where the snow will be.
Cresting a hill and rounding a hairpin left on the edge of a precipice, my brain reads the road ahead and predicts trouble. I slow, round the corner, and hit a tricky, snow-covered right with six sets of tire tracks running right off the road. Despite slowing down, I drive off the road, too.
At least I wasn't thinking about my laundry.
Lesson number four: Watch out for fateWe're there. We won Friday. We won Saturday. We have a slim lead in the championship. All we need to do today is finish second. I'm so nervous, rallying just stopped being fun.
Sunday is just a super-stage. Four laps around a simple, side-by-side course carved into a big rodeo ground. Fun for the spectators, in theory, but mostly a chance to throw it all away within sight of the end. Every year at least one championship is decided on this little super stage. I can afford to lose, but not to crash, so I vow to go slow.
Somehow, though, when the perennial super stage starter Vanessa Allison screeches her glass-shatteringly loud countdown, I lose my resolve to be slow. I'm paired with Jim Pierce's monster 302-powered Ford Ranger and despite my best efforts, I'm just far enough behind, by the halfway point, to get sucked into his rooster tail. In any pavement motorsport, having your painstakingly prepared racecar pummeled is cause for dismay. As my week-old paint job and brand-new windshield punch through a non-stop deluge of rocks, topsoil and whatever else they have in rodeo dirt, though, I break into uncontrollable laughter. Nothing lifts the spirits like racing in a downpour of ballistic horse shit.
Then Rhys Millen rolls.
With a two-minute lead, he has no reason to push it here, but that's the danger of an audience. He's paired against Stephan Verdier, who has managed to get his woefully under-powered PGT Class WRX (PGT cars run restrictors that make them less powerful than a stock WRX) into second overall. Verdier is no threat to Millen, but he's a threat to Millen's ego if he somehow beats him here, in front of the crowd. So Millen pushes it, hits a strange rut/bump/hairpin combination, and gracefully smashes the living hell out of the top of his car. He's lucky and the car lands on its wheels and restarts. Even with the roll, he still beats my lap time by 6 seconds.
The roll brings me back to my very scared place. I finish the day cautiously, but not before Wyeth Gubelmann rolls his WRX in exactly the same corner, exactly one turn from the end of his three-day race. He's not as lucky as Millen and has to push his car across the finish line, losing enough time to drop from third to fifth overall. Fate's hand is busy today.
Which Brings Us To Lesson Number Five: Don't Expect A ParadeAnd then it's over. We won. We drive back to the hotel and promptly fall asleep waiting to drive over the ceremonial finish ramp. For the weeks or months leading up to a typical rally, every move you make is focused around the singular goal of victory. When you finally get there, it's just over and there's nothing left to strive for. The few people who have figured out who won might congratulate you, but other than that, it's just another day of towing your car and a garage full of spare parts around the desert.
The Scary SideIn my years as a rally nut, I've experienced the sport from many angles. I've been frozen to the core as a die-hard spectator, stage hopped in Dave Richards' personal helicopter as a coddled member of the international press, given stranded drivers rides as part of the sweep team, raced last on the road and even as far up as third. Until now, I'd never experienced the sobering fear of being stranded on a stage closed for a medical emergency.
Blasting sideways around blind corners at 80 mph takes the kind of mental acuity you seldom experience. You have to react so quickly you get a single-mindedness that's sometimes hard to shake. Saturday's penultimate stage, at 35 miles, is one of the longest in the country. Around mile 20, we crest a hill to see Steve Winter's Eclipse backward in a ditch. In a fraction of a second, I instinctively scan the scene for a co-driver, see if he's holding an OK sign or a red cross (both come in each routebook for just such an occasion) and try to interpret his frantic waving as "stop," "keep going," or "I'll give you $100 to tow me out." I see the OK and decipher the signal as "go, go, go!
Two miles later, I crest another blind hill and see more frantic waving. There's a rally car on the side of the road and orange things in the middle. I can't make out the signal, but nobody looks hurt. Just as I'm deciding which orange things to go between I snap out of the groove. That guy's not wearing Nomex.
He's a radio worker, one of the dozens of volunteers stationed along the stages to make sure all the rally cars are accounted for and to stop the stage in the event that something goes terribly wrong. Uh, oh.
There's been a crash, we're told, and we have to wait here until some medical help arrives. Amar does the math quickly. There were six cars ahead of us, we passed one in the ditch, there's one parked in front of us. That leaves four possibilities. "This sucks," he observes. "I know all those guys." Indeed, so do I; half of them are programmed into my cell phone.
It seems a lifetime of milling about in the gathering cold of sunset before we hear the helicopters-two of them-and hear over the radio that it was Masayuki and Takako Akaba who crashed. Both are being helicoptered to Las Vegas, but both are conscious.
Over the next few days we learn that they crested a blind hill at 130 kph (81 mph) and missed the left turn that was a mere 20 yards on the other side. Our notes read 250 !JMP 20 L5, which is rally code for exactly what they found over that hill, but at that speed, they were probably in the air until they reached the turn. The car tumbled hundreds of feet across an open field, giving the Akabas a severe shaking, but in the end, only breaking Masayuki's arm.
That both of them were in the hospital and stabilized before we even made it back to Rally HQ is a comforting testament to the efficiency of the volunteer radio crews, as is the total absence of frostbite among the four teams stranded in the middle of the stage. I never got the name of the volunteer who waved us down, but whoever you are, thanks for the propane heater.
When Hard is Softer Than Soft"We have a problem. The compounds got switched again."
Last year I was lucky enough to get several sets of prototype Falken rally tires, half in a soft compound and half in medium. Halfway through the rally I finally started poking at the treads and realized the tires had been labeled incorrectly. The soft compound tires felt distinctively harder than the mediums.
Just days before this year's race, I poked my new tires and realized the problem had never been fixed. Hence the frantic last-minute call to Falken. Mine was followed quickly by their frantic call to Japan and a calm, patient reply that everything was OK. At operating temperature, the Japanese engineers claimed, the soft ones got softer.
Yeah, right.
Skeptically, I performed some analytical poking. Push your finger against the corner of a medium tread block and it squishes and deforms. Do the same on a soft one and you hurt your finger. Dig your fingernail into a medium compound, though, and it springs back. Do the same in the soft one and you leave a nail print that lasts for minutes. Hmmm.
When cold, the soft one is harder, but it has a sticky, clay-like consistency compared to the more rubbery medium.
During the race, I put the compounds to the test. Stages 8, 9 and 10 follow a single road from Peach Springs, Ariz., to a small airport on the west rim of the Grand Canyon. Stages 11 and 12 follow that same road back. Taking advantage of the consistent conditions, I ran mediums on the way out and softs on the return.
On the paved transit road, the soft tires did pick up pebbles like an R-compound street tire. On the stage, they might have felt slightly grippier on the hard-packed sections where the gravel had been swept away, but the difference was subtle. The experiment was cut short by the Akabas crash, but after 22 miles of racing, the tread blocks did feel completely different. Poke the corner of a soft tread block when it's warm and it deforms like raw cookie dough.
For the rallyist on a budget, the choice is easy. Medium and soft feel the same in gravel and medium is nearly as good in hard-packed dirt. Treadlife on the medium compound is much better, though. Barring flats, I could probably run three or four rallies on eight mediums, but would be lucky to get two out of eight softs.