Gold Digger 2007, Aug 18

After our no-show at C2C, Gold Digger was to be our first TSD on gravel tires. "What do gravel tires look like?" you ask. They look much they'd do a much better job on gravel than all-season tires...that's what. The tires have a soft compound, deep tread and a very strong bead. They also happen to make a lot of noise and have a relatively short tread-life.

GD 2007 was quite uneventful as far as the usual 'events' that happen; no offs, no wrong turns, no close calls...nothing. We scored well enough (75 in 19 checkpoints) to finish 2nd overall and 1st in our class. Turnout was a little dismal for this event with only 6 teams competing.

The gravel tires were obviously a success though and even I could notice the difference in the corners. Traction was much improved and it was easier to maintain CAS in the corners.

Some of you may have been wondering what the route instructions look like. Here you go. The highlighted numbers in the 2nd column are the 'car average speed' numbers (CAS). The TSD column is the distance in km (with 10 m accuracy) and the rightmost column is the instruction corresponding to the distance. Some instructions are just informational like SOR (sign on right), others are for cautions and then the rest are actual directional instructions like KL (keep left), SA (straight ahead).

You can see my calculated times in pencil on the right side of the page. The top of the 2nd column is the start time for the non-existant car 0...7:08 in this example. Since we were car 5, we start 5 minutes after car 0 at 7:13 which I have indicated as 13:00.

The distance at the next instruction is calculated as follows:

13 min 00 s + (0.84 km - 0.00 km) * 60 kph/45 kph = 14 min 07 s

I use a calculator that works in degrees/minutes/seconds so that I don't have to bother with calculations in decimal and then conversion to minutes/seconds. When there is a large distance between route instructions (eg. between instructions 3 and 4 above), I will calculate times for distances at 1 km or 0.5 km intervals after the last instruction so that I can still check our time along the way.

I must be done calculations as I'm not looking at my lap.


The Sunday morning tire change before heading home.