T-Bird Rally, Day 2, Feb 20, 2005

Day 2 of the rally was quite a relaxing affair from a co-drivers point of view. Due to the complaints received by the police during the Big White regularity at the end of day 1, this same regularity in reverse was scrapped for the start of day 2. Translation...plenty of time for calcs before the first regularity. In fact, we had so much time that we took a detour on our way to the first reg to go over our 'passing of the salt truck' part of the road in daylight. It was pretty clear in daylight that we had made a somewhat risky manoeuvre. Hindsight is great.

The weather was fantastic on day 2, bright and sunny and we had an awesome view of the lake to start one of the regs. I believe we were first in novice class after day 1 but we made one critical mistake on day 2 that put us into 2nd...

We were approaching an acute right turn and we could see the checkpoint vehicle ahead on the left. Unfortunately we missed the turn so we decided to continue until a safe turnaround spot could be found. I figured that we'd passed the checkpoint so our time had been logged. Wrong. The road crested quite frequently and wasn't that wide so by the time we found a nice turnaround and actually headed down the right road, we were way off schedule and our time was logged as we passed the apex of the turn and not the beginning of the turn as I had thought. We were pretty happy with our performance until we got scores for the day. Stephen did an awesome job keeping the car on the road and catching up to where we should have been on the reg.

Other cars weren't so lucky that day. We saw the novice Escort over a bank but they waved us by. We also came upon a safety triangle with a car embedded in the snow at the left turn ahead followed by another safety triangle at the very next turn with a car pointed 180 degress the wrong way in the left snow bank. We had some fishtail action ourselves but Stephen managed to keep everything under control.

The other memory moment of the day was a hairpin left that we had been warned about at the drivers meeting. We were told to take it veeerrrrry slow...less than 20k, 10-15k is even better. What they neglected to mention on the route instructions is that this hairpin left was preceded by an even worse hairpin right that dropped off as you went around it. The hairpin left that we had been warned about could be seen coming since the exposure was on the left too...the hairpin right totally surprised us since it's exposure was on the left too! At the end of the day, I think every other team we talked to had the same experience.

The day finished without any scratches on the car. We ended placing 2nd in novice class and got a little plaque for our efforts. Everyone got toques too on day 1 which I forgot to mention earlier.

One more thing to note, one of the lugnuts got cross-threaded when we were putting the all-seasons back on at the end of the day. Canadian Tire was closed and none of the gas station had any so we ended up driving home with 4 lugnuts on one wheel instead of 5. Everyone said no problem but I think we were both a tad worried.