Roshambo Racing!

Introducing.... www.roshamboracing.com.  This is the new place to keep track of Dan and Doug and rally racing.

Olympus Results

The Olympus Rally was April 24-25.  The rally was based in Ocean Shores, Washington.

This rally was a Rally America National Championship event, so there were teams there from around the country and Canada.  The fastest cars were there, including Travis Pastrana, Ken Block, Antoine L'Estage, and Patrick Richard.

Luckily, those fast guys were competing in the National rally, while we entered in the regional rally.  Our new car is fantastic, but still worth 25% what those cars are worth.  One cool thing about national rallies is that they offer "stage notes" which describe ever turn in the rally, and this rally also included recce, which gave us a chance to see all the stages in advance.

Dan drove on Saturday.  This was his first time driving the rally car in competition, after having driven the car maybe 10 total miles before that.  His goal was very simple:  Finish the rally and learn the car.  He drove slowly for the first few stages.  His goal to finish was challenged by some really rough twisty, and sloppy first few stages.  Dan did very, very well for his first time in the car.  After 64 stage miles, he finished 4th in Open class, and 10th overall in the Regional rally.  He tried left-foot braking a little bit, and got used to the traction of the new car.  He said that he felt like it was much more stable in all conditions than our old car.

Despite Dan's moderate pace, I got carsick during the 4th stage, Crane Creek.  This stage was very, very twisty and rough.  I never barfed, but it was close.  For the last three stages, Terry Hanson kindly agreed to navigate for Dan.  Terry normally navigates for his son, Travis, but they had crashed out of the rally earlier in the day.

There were no problems with the car all day and the most that our crew did was fuel the car and check fluids.


On Sunday, I drove.  The stages on Sunday were ones that I'd just driven at the Doo Wops rally in March, so I felt very comfortable on them.  We pushed on a at a moderate pace while I continued to learn the car, get more comfortable with left-foot braking, and learn to listen to the stage notes.  In the end, we finished 4th in Open Class and 5th overall in the Regional.  We were just 8 seconds behind 4th place.


We were joined by a crew from RalliTEK, who helped service the car and took lots of video over the weekend.  HUGE THANKS to RalliTEK for their support of our efforts. 

We also were joined by Bill Kostich, Bryce Nash, and Jessica Sutton in the service area.


Here are some pictures and video from the race:

This one is one the first stage, Wreck Creek.  Cool view of the ocean in the background.

Here's what we saw rounding a corner at the very beginning of the first stage: Two cars crashed.  Luckily, we didn't join them!

Here's Dan negotiating a mud pit.  I think this is the Crane Creek stage.

Here's Doug on the Brooklyn Stage.

Here's another awesome video put together by Sean Sexton of RalliTEK:
http://www.youtube.com/user/RalliTEK2008#p/a/u/0/PEqnBCh0BHU


Our next race is the Oregon Trail Rally, April 15-17.  The rally is based in Portland, but has stages as far away as The Dalles and Dufur, in the Columbia River Gorge.  Hope to see you there.

Mt. Hood on the hood

Here's the car with the new graphics on the hood.  It looks great!

Almost ready for Olympus!

A few more details... And the Olympus Driving Order

We've been plugging a way at some smaller details since Doo Wops.  Here, the gauge panel is finally done. 

We also got both radiator fans working.  We were thinking that one of the fans only ran with the A/C, which isn't installed in our car.  So, we figured that one fan wouldn't work- and that's how we ran Doo Wops.  But in fact, both fans run as long as all the relays and fuses are plugged in.


Dan has been working on adding some grating to the front of the car, to protect the radiator from rocks and sticks.  Dan has also finally solved the puzzle to allow us to hook up the oil pressure sensor.  That should be done soon.

The car gets some more RalliTek vinyl tomorrow!  It will get Mt. Hood on the hood of the car.  Now it will be even harder to discern from Mark Mager's car.  But we have black wheels and he has gold.  So that helps.

Dan got to choose if he'd drive first or second at Olympus.  Day 1 has 75 miles or so.  Day 2 has only 38 miles or so, but the Day 2 roads are somewhat preferred because they're more smooth and flowing. 

Dan chose Day 1.

We're going to do the recce at Olympus, which means we get to drive the roads once in advance of the rally.  We're also running the Jemba notes, which detail every single corner on the road.  This is different from "route book" that we usually use- which only shows the most dangerous corners. This should be fun!

Olympus is April 24-25 and is based in Ocean Shores, Washington.

Doo Wops Video - In Car

Here's some in-car video that I mixed together.  Some forward facing video, and some facing Paul and I.  This is from the Smith Creek Stage.

Terrific video from Doo Wops

Here's a really good video put together by Sean Sexton from RalliTEK.  It features both our car and Mark Mager's...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spius5nDiM4

Cool Doo Wop Photo

This one is from Matt Young at WorldRallySport.com