Mitsubishi leads Manufacturers Championship with Convincing Win at Perce-Neige

The 47th running of Rallye Perce-Neige, the first round of the 2012 Canadian Rally Championship, was won by Antoine L’Estage of St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec and co-driver Nathalie Richard of Halifax, in their new Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.

Reigning Canadian and North American champion, L’Estage becomes the all-time record winner at Perce-Neige with a fifth win. L’Estage and Richard clinched best time in seven of the first ten stages and motored to an outright 8-minute victory in a demanding event that saw only 18 of the 42 cars reach the finish. The Production Sport class was won by defending champion Yavor Klostranec with Emily Dowell in the co-driver seat in their two-wheel drive Mitsubishi Lancer.

Two other teams of the Mitsubishi Brigade were among the finishers. Synchro Racing saw Simon Losier partnered with veteran co-driver Brian Maxwell in his EVO VIII clinch a rewarding fifth place. Alvin Fong and Billy Machin of Danbury, Connecticut were second among the novice crews in their new Lancer Evolution IX.

“The Mitsubishi Brigade teams dominated Rallye Perce-Neige to earn a record-winning victory. It is also exciting to see a base Lancer finish such a difficult event and win its class”, said Mr. Kenji Toh, VP Sales/Marketing & Corporate Planning for Mitsubishi Motor Sales of Canada. “We look forward to continuing the momentum in Calgary.”

Rocky Mountain Rally preview

The next Canadian Rally Championship stop for the teams will be in Calgary, Alberta in the last week of May. The challenging Rocky Mountain event is always unpredictable, as roads can be dry and windy as well as snowy and slippery, which makes it a real challenge. Last year winners were Antoine L’Estage and Nathalie Richard in their Lancer Evolution. More information is available at www.rockymountainrally.com.

Antoine L’Estage and co-driver Nathalie Richard (left) started their season on a high note with an outright victory in their new Lancer Evolution X at Rallye Perce-Neige. Right is defending Production Sport champion Yavor Klostranec with co-driver Emily Dowell taking Production Sport in their stock Lancer.

Credit : Philip Ericksen

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Smart tire choice and road position allowed L’Estage and Richard to open up a small lead over rivals Pat Richard (Squamish, BC) and Alan Ockwell (Toronto) of Subaru Rally Team Canada. Richard and Ockwell landed heavily on a jump on the second stage, damaging the car and losing boost, and then losing brakes. Despite this, the pair was only 27 seconds back from the lead at the first service. They would only run a few more stages before parking their car with driveline problems.

“We led from the first stage, and spun and lost time on the fourth stage, and then got back on track,” said L’Estage. “We didn’t make any other mistakes for the rest of the day and it’s a great way to start the season. I don’t know [why we're so successful]. Things are clicking and it works.”

For Nathalie Richard, the Rallye Perce-Neige is her 100th career start, a fact that makes the win even more gratifying. “We both really wanted to come here and win this one,” said Richard. “These weren’t easy conditions, and it’s a great way to start the season. We’re just doing what we’re doing and it seems to work.”

Podium regular Leo Urlichich (Toronto) and co-driver Carl Williamson (Swansea, GB) got off to a rough start. Timing mistakes on the first few stages led to six minutes in penalties, and the pair were pushing to make up time and positions – perhaps a bit too hard. A spin on a fast straight damaged the back end of the car, but the two were luckily able to continue. Incredibly, between a fast pace and misfortunes of rivals, the pair were able to climb up the order, finishing second overall.

“It is amazing. We tried hard,” said Urlichich. “Everyone made mistakes, the car had a few problems, I definitely made mistakes, Carl unfortunately made a mistake, but we all fought back for a second place on the podium.”

Sylvain and Simon Vincent (Terrebonne, QC), who were aiming for a top five finish, also benefitted from other’s troubles, and the cagy veteran was well aware of what strategy leads to success. “You have to pace yourself at a rally like this,” said Sylvain at the midday service stop. “It’s such a long event, you need to make sure you don’t get too tired, too early. You can lose concentration and make mistakes.” A mistake is exactly what destroyed the podium hopes for Bruno Carre and Yvan Joyal, both of Laval, QC. The pair rolled late in the rally, and though they managed to finish, they dropped from second overall to eighth. That allowed Sylvain Vincent to move up to third overall, earning valuable points towards his goal to rank in the top ten lifetime driver rankings.

“I was aiming for a top five, as that would be perfect,” said Sylvain. “It means good points, which is really important! It is really hard with the competition we have, to get into the top five at a gravel event, but on ice and snow, it is a bit easier.”

In Two Wheel Drive, a battle appeared to be brewing early on between the team of Peter Kocandrle and Angela Cosner, and Thierry Menegoz and Guillaume Bechard. After two stages, the teams were just 0.1 seconds apart. However, Menegoz struggled to find grip and dropped down the order before retiring. Kocandrle took advantage of his growing lead and lessened pressure to open a lead of more than 20 minutes over his closest competitor.

“Everything was great until the last four stages. I had my first flat on stage, and a bit of an off, but someone helped us out. Then we got stuck behind a car and followed for a while and then backed off, and then they spun and backed right into us, breaking one of our lights,” said Kocandrle.”We came here to set some points in place for the year and try to build things for this year and maybe run the North American championship. The guys at Open Road Motorsports have been awesome, and they’ve really looked after us.”

The Rallye Perce-Neige is the first round of the six event Canadian Rally Championship, and is made up of 16 stages, totalling 248km of competitive distance. Canada’s only true winter rally, roads are covered in ice and snow, but teams are forbidden from using studded tires, requiring a smooth hand at the wheel for a driver to be successful.

“The roads are fantastic. Tortue is already the biggest challenge in Canadian rally, just to make it to the end is an accomplishment,” said Sylvain Erickson, Clerk of the Course. “This year, teams had to do it twice. The speed of the guys was really great, everything worked out to be very impressive.”

The Canadian Rally Championship is comprised of six events held nationwide in a season that extends from February to November. The series is presented by Subaru Canada, supported by Yokohama Tire Canada and features contingency programs from Subaru Canada and Mitsubishi Canada. The Canadian Association of Rallysport (CARS) is the official sanctioning body for rallying in Canada.

Rally car racing is often described simply as “real cars, real roads, real fast.” The all-season motorsport sees drivers and their co-drivers take modified road cars to the limit as they achieve blistering speeds over closed-road courses that typically cover more than 150 kilometers of gravel, dirt or snow-covered roads. Fans can get up close to the cars in the service areas and catch all the action from specially designated spectator points located at the best spots on the route.

Full coverage of the championship will air on RDS and TSN. Check local listings.

For more information: www.carsrally.ca or www.rallyeperceneige.com

Rallye Perce Neige Final Results

1. Antoine L’Estage – Nathalie Richard – two hours, 45 minutes, 18.8 seconds
2. Leo Urlichich – Carl Williamson – 2:53:56.0
3. Sylvain Vincent – Simon Vincent – 2:59:11.5
4. Mathieu Dube – Eric Losier – 3:01:01.2
5. Simon Losier – Brian Maxwell – 3:02:43.7
6. Joel Levac – Stephanie Lewis – 3:02:58.8
7. Steeve Hobbs – Jean-Mathieu Tremblay – 3:03:38.9
8. Bruno Carre – Yvan Joyal – 3:04:17.2
9. Warren Haywood – John Hall – 3:15:07.9
10. Maxime Rochefort-Laframboise – Jerome Milette – 3:17:47.0

Photo Credit: Andrew Harvey Photography

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“It’s a convincing victory, winning the rally with a gap of over eight minutes ahead of second place,” confides Antoine L’Estage, who adds, “I felt much more comfortable with the new car than last weekend in Michigan. Nathalie once again did a fantastic job co-driving, we didn’t have a single mechanical issue, and our Yokohama tires allowed us to push as much as we needed to throughout this very long rally. We can really say that it was the perfect scenario for us.”

Winners of nine of the sixteen competitive stages in the 2012 Rallye Perce-Neige, Antoine L’Estage and Nathalie Richard once again proved from the beginning how competitively John Buffum has built yet another Lancer Evo X. “Leading the Canadian and North American championships – there’s no better way for us to start our season,” concludes Nathalie Richard who was celebrating her 100th rally, of which she has won no fewer than thirty-eight!

The next outing for the Rockstar Energy Drink team is set for the last weekend of February in Missouri, where Antoine L’Estage, Nathalie Richard and the entire team will return to the Rally America series to defend their 2011 victory at the 100 Acre Wood rally.

Antoine L’Estage holds four North American championship titles (2007, 2008, 2010, 2011), four Canadian titles (2006, 2007, 2010, 2011), one American title (2010), and thirty-two overall victories in Canada and the US. Nathalie Richard holds seven overall national championship titles (4 Canadian and 3 American), as well as thirty-eight overall rally wins on both sides of the border. She also holds a record seven North American Co-Driving Championship titles (2004 – 2011, excluding 2006).

Antoine L’Estage and Nathalie Richard participate in the 2012 Rally America and Canadian Rally Championships with the support of Rockstar Energy Drink, Formica Group, Fenetres Concerto, Mitsubishi Canada, Yokohama Tires, Drenth Motorsport Gearboxes, Garrett Turbos, Energie Cardio, VP Racing Fuels, Exe-Tc Suspensions, Hawk Performance Brake Pads, Driver’s Edge Autosport, and Libra Racing. For more information on the team or on rallying in general, visit antoinelestage.com.

Action Photo: World Rally Sport /Melina Lamoureux
Victory Photo : World Rally Sport /Mike Proulx

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Road conditions were incredibly challenging as slippery ice covered most of the stages. The team took a slow and steady approach with the goal of bringing the car across the finish line in one piece. A very consistent drive by Carl and spot on calls by Dave all weekend yielded successful results (although the rally was not without its moments – nearly every stage had a spin or missed corner). The service crew led by Matt Alexander and comprised of Martin Asao, Mike Rhode, and Jesse Lang did not face any difficult repairs and kept the car running smoothly for the entire rally.

The next event for ZRT will be 100 Acre Wood at the end of February in Salem, MO. The team has unfinished business at 100AW as they have broken down on the same stage two years in a row.

Ziptie Rally is based out of Golden Valley, MN. Their 2012 partners include: Carbonetic, Morries Minnetonka Subaru, TSS FAB, Team Powder, Gearhead Designz, and St. Paul Media. For the latest on the team check http://www.facebook.com/ziptie.rally

Photos by Erik Olsen

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Sno*Drift is the season opener of the RallyAmerica National Championship series, and is held in Montmorency County, Michigan, USA, and it featured no fewer than 67 entries form all parts of the world. Studded tires are prohibited at Sno*Drift Rally, and the difficult conditions tested the drivers as the stages had a mixture of snow, sand, gravel and lots of glare ice. “Our recce notes were crucial this year,” said Chris. “It was very important to note the areas that had thawed and turned to gravel. It was equally important to note the icy areas and slow down appropriately.” Chris and Phil stayed mostly clean on Day 1, recording only one puncture near the end of Stage 5. Their fast but cautious approach kept them in a 4-way battle for second place at the end of Day 1, and they handily took their first Group 2 Regional class win of the year.

Overnight snow covered some of the exposed gravel on Day 2, but the team suffered a setback on the first leg of Day 2, after a minor run-in with a snow bank broke a CV shaft. “It was entirely my fault,” said Chris. “I bumped a snow bank that had some gravel and dirt in it, and even though we were going slow, we broke the left CV joint in two. That was on Stage 15, and it meant that we had to run Stages 16 and 17 with only one-wheel-drive. It took us 4 minutes to climb the first hill on SS16. In fact, we needed help from some marshals and fans to push the car up the icy slope. One little mistake from me was all it took to end our bout for a National podium finish.” After the crew quickly repaired the damage at service, Chris and Phil then went out to battle back for some Regional points. They pressed hard and once again displayed their perseverance as they came from behind to take yet another Regional Group 2 win, although they could only muster a fifth place finish in 2WD National. The Weasel RallySport team finished the event with a double Group 2 Regional win and Chris is now the Central Region Group 2 points leader.

The team will be back in action at Rally in the 100 Acre Wood in Salem, Missouri, USA in February. Chris and the Weasel RallySport Team would like to thank EBC Brakes, MadDog STS, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Angry Sheep Motorsports, Silco Fire Protection, Modern Performance and JayRacing.com for their continued support.

www.youtube.com/user/freightdog75
www.twitter.com/#!/freightdog319
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002214847602

www.EBCBrakes.com
www.maddogsts.com
www.angrysheepmotorsports.com
www.jayracing.com
www.silcofireprotection.com
www.modernperformance.com

Photo by Elliott Sherwood

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“We’ve been thinking about smart phone apps for a couple years now, looking for an activity that was engaging for fans and went beyond presenting the same data that a web browser could,” said Anders Green of NASA Rally Sport. “Then we finally realized we could take one of the oldest spectator tricks in the books, modernize it and computerize it, and do the whole thing in the middle of the woods even with no data connection at all. That was worth putting some time into.”

Experienced rally fans will immediately recognize the technique. By marking the time that each rally car as it passes, one can tell whether each vehicle is faster or slower than the previous car, simply by assuming that they all started one minute apart somewhere down the road. The result is that the roadside fan can determine that the first car was 1.5 seconds faster than the second and that the third car was 2.3 seconds slower. The technique can’t discover the overall scores of the drivers, but instead shows split times that reveals the raw performance of the stage that the fan is experiencing at the moment.

“Split times are the most visceral scores in racing, because they are telling you what’s happening in the race before it’s over,” says Green. “Especially in a sport like rally, where you can’t visually compare two cars at the same time. The infrastructure required to have the organization deliver official split times for rally is massive and expensive, it would involve communication towers, light beams, power supplies, and data connections, all set up in remote and hostile environments. It’s mega-dollars to build that kind of a system. Being able to get the same thrill from a split time you generate yourself for with a 99 cent app is a lot more exciting and appealing. Plus this method works at any rally regardless of what scoring technology the event happens to be using.”

NASA Rally Sport, the grassroots rally sanctioning body in the US, focuses on competitor fun and providing support for rally organizers. Stepping into the smart phone arena is a natural extension of its existing technologies in volunteering databases, cloud-based scoring software, and virtual volunteering. Providing tools to the racers, organizers, and fans to increase their enjoyment of rally is a core mission of NASA Rally Sport.

The app, currently available in the Android Market at http://RallyBarcode.com/pr1, uses no special features and is designed to work on any version of the Android operating system. Future expansions, which could take advantage of GPS location and crowd-sourced split times, are currently being planned.

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