J Cox
11-04-2006, 10:58 AM
Lake Superior Pro Rally (LSPR) 06 – The advertised “Oldest toughest meanest rally on the circuit” beats us hard, but for a change, we survive.
LSPR is always a butt-kicker, especially mine. I’ve had most of my DNFs at LSPR, and I’m guessing most Central division rally teams would say the same. I finish 95% of my rallys, but before this year, I’d DNF’d at LSPR three times in six days of previous competition. LSPR 06 was unusual for me in many ways.
Many times I’ve come down to the last minute trying to get ready for a rally, unsure if I would get everything done in time to make an event. I usually end up leaving with a big list of important tasks I couldn’t get done. This year I had the luxury of being ready in time and working only on “optional” tasks at the last minute. Also for the first time, I was contemplating withdrawing. I was pretty sure my truck would not finish, and I would turn a rebuildable motor into scrap metal by trying to complete the event. A DNF, especially early in an event wastes my resources and the time invested by my crew and co-driver. I did not feel right heading toward the event under these circumstances. Tuning, oil leaks, coolant in the oil, wildly fluctuating oil pressure, smoke from one bank of cylinders, and other mechanical maladies all had me wondering if I was wise to continue with plans for LSPR 06.
I finally snapped out of it and said to myself:
“I’ve busted my butt to go, schedules, entry and hotel money have been committed, what is the worst thing that can happen? I don’t want to not even try an event just because I MIGHT not finish it. I have no idea how close to death my motor is, many old V8s run for years with no oil pressure and contaminated oil. I’ll take the chance and try to take it easy on my faithful steed.”
The mechanical uncertainty kept me from doing an early co-driver search (I hate the thought of getting a co-driver committed only to have to tell him/her at the last minute that I won’t be going). I also didn’t want to ask strangers to co-drive, since my chance of DNF was high, and I didn’t feel right about having someone travel great distance only to DNF early in the event. So I just checked local folks I knew who would know what they were getting into, all of whom had committed to other teams by this point in time. I almost didn’t register for the event just due to lack of a co-driver, but decided LSPR was too much fun, too close to home, and that I get too depressed when I miss it, so I sent the entry in even though I had no navie. A good friend who usually drives (Scott Parrott) decided to co-drive once I convinced him I didn’t care about our finishing position, we were just going for a fun steady cruise to try to finish with no championship at stake. To minimize losses in case of DNF, I decided to do this event extra cheap by not buying notes, and getting one hotel room for the whole team (cabin).
Things only got more worrisome during the last week before the event. The engine seemed to be getting worse, developing a miss and smoking more, and a hoped-for fix to the oil leakage didn’t work. The cancellation deadline approached; Scott and I decided to go anyway since if we DNF, so be it, we’ll relax, watch cars go by, and enjoy a nice weekend in the UP hanging out at a rally. We packed a few more warm/waterproof clothes, spare fluids and tools in the rally truck than I normally carry, added stop-leak to the radiator and headed north.
The race was on … albeit a bit slowly. I kept my word to Scott about not caring how we competitive we were. Scott was fairly new to co-driving and thus nervous. I wanted to finish with a truck worth rebuilding (not exploded into worthless bits). Our choice not to use stage notes put us at a huge disadvantage. We had almost no chance to win anything, so we focused on fun, took it relatively easy, drove smooth, and avoided high RPM and wide open throttle. I didn’t pay any attention to our times or position in class all weekend, in fact, I didn’t even know where in the results we finished until I looked it up online when I got home. Kinda nice to have that low stress level, I might try it more often.
My conservative pace probably served us well early on Friday. In the drivers meeting, we had been warned of extremely slippery conditions on the first and especially second stages. This turned out to be good advice since many cars went off the road on these stages. Even driving as slow as I ever have, I still managed to have the nearest miss of my career (not counting the time I actually did hit a tree, since that that was not a miss). On SS2 “Bob Lake” the abrupt disappearance of grip on a sharp left took me by surprise and I just could not keep the truck on the crown of the road. I got that sinking feeling you get when physics tells you “you’re going off” and it stops being time to save and starts becoming time to decide the best place to stuff it. We came to a stop less than an inch from hitting two trees at the side of the road. Whew!
Stage notes are addictive. Once you’ve used them then switch back to the route book, you realize how blind you are running only from the tulips in the route book. I don’t think notes are any less safe, but they are easy to misuse, you must be aware of their limitations and choose your pace accordingly. Keeping the same margin of safety, you can go much quicker on notes and you get to function more like a team since the co-driver’s job becomes critical to success and safety. Not having stage notes maginifed the effect of the unpredictable grip on our pace, I ran much slower than usual on Friday.
My fears of the mechanical condition of the truck were validated shortly after the beginning of the event with temps up to 250 and oil pressure as low as 15 lbs. on Herman, the very first stage. I was very worried since the first stage was only 7 miles and I was already in trouble, with the 17 mile high-speed Passmore stage coming up twice later in the evening. I was trying to decide in advance at what temp or oil pressure I would call it quits. I decided if I saw anything less than 5 psi of oil or temp of over 250 F I would shut it down.
Somehow I was still having a great time, I love everything about LSPR, the technical challenge and road variety are awesome. This event always provides excitement regardless of the condition of one’s car. LSPR has everything from rough and slow to tarmac and gravel so fast the scenery gets blurry, and when the scenery isn’t blurry, it’s gorgeous!
At the start of Echo Lake, the last stage before service, I mentally prepared for DNF and vowed to not get crabby or angry when it happened, to keep the whole event fun, regardless of the outcome. As feared, about half way through, the head gasket went from being “leaky” to “completely blown”. The motor then pumped the water jackets full of air until the water pump was pumping only foam. Scott and I were watching the gauges closely and the temp gauge just suddenly snapped to full hot, as fast as a tach needle moves. 265 F is the last number on the gauge, and the needle was well past that. I made a quick decision that any damage was already done and since the motor still sounded and felt fine, I decided to keep going. I backed way off the throttle and just cruised to the stage finish (thinking our crew would have an easier time getting us at the finish and we would have the company of the finish control crew to pass the time). The last miles of the stage seemed to take FOREVER, with the temp just pegged the whole time, oil pressure never over 20 psi.., and me listening for bearing noise and feeling for seizure in the throttle response. We made it to the end, and as soon as I coasted toward the control the oil pressure went to zero, so I kept the RPM up a bit to maintain at least some oil pressure. Getting through that control seemed to take FORVER. Once clear of the control, we pulled over to let it cool and I SLOWLY opened the radiator cap to bleed the air from the cooling system. The night was dead calm, and our large column of steam must have looked like we parked on old faithful. The cooling system bleed also seemed to take FOREVER. It’s interesting to see how some people stop to check on you and some don’t. Not that it’s bad not to stop, I myself certainly can’t always stop to check on others, but I thought it was really cool of those who did check to see if they could help. About ten minutes later, I tried to start it, fully expecting it not to, but it fired right up without horrible bearing noise. We cruised to service where we barely made it on time, pulling up to the control at the end of our minute. I think our crew (mom, dad, and wife) were shocked to see us.
At service in Kenton I replaced the air in the radiator with water, and diluted the coolant in the crankcase with some oil and more stop leak. Ryan Johnson was good enough to give his notes to Scott to try since Ryan’s team had DNF’d. Scott WAS NOT excited about trying the notes. I was convinced he would like it, but didn’t want to pressure him into it, and finally convinced him to try them on the last stage of the day. He did really well, our pace picked up immediately, and I think he enjoyed them and quickly became confident. The swap to running on stage notes made for an interesting experiment, since we got to run the exact same stage on both tulips and notes on the same day, both times in the dark, with the same risk approach used each pass. Doing the math, my pace increased 5% when we switched to the notes, and remember that was Scott’s first time ever reading notes. Notes are clearly a big advantage.
The second run through Passmore wasn’t as troublesome, since I now knew I needed to bleed the air from the cooling system before every stage. This kept us from overheating on all but the longest stages and transits. I really enjoyed this stage since the stage notes allowed us push a bit for the first time while that weekend while at the same time putting less stress on the motor (less acceleration needed with notes, due to less need to slow for corners and crests I couldn’t see past).
We finsihed! I loved my motor for getting through that day but hated it for having the problem in the first place.
Anticipating a DNF, I’d had the crew bring the trailer to service. This helped a lot by allowing us to trailer back to town, keeping almost 100 miles off my ailing motor. Trailering back to town also allowed me to get an extra hour of sleep (while the crew drove me back to Houghton).
However, before we could leave the last MTC in Kenton, we discovered Scott had lost his car keys at some point during the day. So we all traded an hour of sleep for combing the ditches of Kenton for a set of computer-chip-in-them-so-they-can’t-be-duplicated Saab keys.
We eventually gave up and headed back to Houghton while Scott stressed about how he was going to get his car back to Minneapolis. Scott was a VERY good sport all weekend, staying positive in the face of chaos erupting around him. Before going to bed at 3:30AM, we decided to put off until morning the decision as to if we should withdraw from Saturday’s event.
7:30 AM seemed to come earlier than 7:30 ever has. I gave the truck a quick check-over and the motor started and ran fine. Wow. Now what to do? I’d already pushed my luck beyond prudence. The motor had taken a severe thermal beating. Saturday’s high speed stages would strain even a healthy motor to its max and would like cause catastrophic failure to mine. Friday had been tough on the crew, and I almost told them to go back to bed (that I would withdraw from Saturday’s event), but decided it was at least worth going up to park expose where we would have a couple hours to take a closer look at things. We left mom in bed and staggered toward Calumet, thinking we’d be back soon.
Scott decided he had to head back to Minneapolis immediately in order to get his spare car keys, drive back to Houghton, then drive back to Minneapolis AGAIN in time to be back for work on Monday. Scott was not having a good weekend, and it was only going to get worse. My hat is off to him for not having a complete nervous breakdown at some point.
After confirming Rally America would let me withdraw after park expose if need be, I unloaded the rally truck from its trailer and drove into park expose just in time to avoid a penalty. Once in our expose spot, I started frantically working on the truck, Kaari started looking for co-drivers, Scott went to find Ryan to give his stage notes back, and dad made trips back and forth to the service truck to keep me supplied with tools. I did a miserable oil change (that normally requires the skid plates to be removed), refilled the radiator and found more stop leak (thank you Calumet Chevrolet!).
The first cars were leaving, and I still didn’t have a co-driver!
Enter Ryan Johnson and Bob Olson who had DNF’d with a broken driveshaft on Friday. Bob offered Scott a ride back to Minneapolis. THANK YOU Bob! Ryan offered to co-drive for me. THANK YOU Ryan!
I finished up the truck while Ryan ran back to his hotel to retrieve his suit and helmet. We got to the line just in time to take the start.
Now all that mattered to me was getting Ryan a respectable number of stage miles in appreciation for his willingness to step in. However, louder bearing noise, even with fresh oil, had me doubting we’d even finish the first transit.
I REALLY tip my cap to Ryan. After getting out of Bob’s beautiful brand new RX8 rally car, he got in a low-budget, crude, known sick truck, likely to DNF, with a driver he didn’t know, and gave up a day of spectating with his wife. I hope he is happy with his decision, I’m sure he was shocked to eventually cross the finish line, with respectable stage times to boot.
I’d picked up a secret weapon before breakfast that probably saved our race: A radiator cap with a lever to release pressure (Scott’s suggestion). This cut the time required to bleed the air from the cooling system from about 10 minutes to about 1 (and increased the safety of the operation 1000%). The wonder-cap let me bleed air and top up coolant before every stage. We never overheated on Saturday!
Every stage on day 2 of LSPR is epic. Saturday started with the rough and tricky Gratiot Lake. This stage tries to trick you into going to fast by starting with wide roads and grippy sandy soils. Then part way through it instantly changes to narrow and slippery. I marked this transition two years ago by parking against a tree. Dave Cizmas marked the same spot last year. This is the only stage where I’ve ever had an actual violent crash. I always go really slow past that spot now.
I like rough stages. The truck is durable, and should be fast on the rough stages, but it isn’t. None of our MN stages are rough, so LSPR provides valuable tuning data. I learned this weekend that the suspension badly needs tuning and it’s performance on Gratiot, Burma, and others was so poor that even at our conservative pace, the truck bottomed heavily, was uncontrolled, and our times slowed noticeably when compared to other teams. Ryan has ridden in some very good cars and confirmed that the good cars are able to push much harder in the rough than my truck will currently allow.
Stage 2 (Delaware Mine) really showed me how far down on power the motor was, it felt quite sluggish. Ryan was doing a fantastic job, and he had brought stage notes with him!
At service in Copper Harbor, I had a tough decision to make about tires for the upcoming Brockway Mountain tarmac stages. I could continue running my mud tires, which would put a lot of wear on them and not offer much grip, or I could change to my tarmac tires, which are at least 2” shorter than they should be, limiting ground clearance and capping top speed at 110 MPH. I went with the tarmacs (nothing special, just a cheap wide high performance street tire). This was the right choice, because the grip made that stage an absolute blast. The decision had consequences however. We went into a dip at what I thought was a reasonable speed but bottomed the skid plates HARD into the road (later found to have bent the skid plate mounts and pushed the plate against the front diff). After that, I wussed on the rest of the jumps and dips. Proof of this can be seen in the work of all the photographers at the big jump where we were one of very few cars to get no air. I also wussed on the really fast section near the end of the stage to save the motor. As someone who doesn’t ever get to race on tarmac, Brockway is a huge treat for me.
Getting a second stage on Brockway was another huge treat this year, since it allowed us figure out just how fast we could take the various corners, dips and jumps. That let us push much harder on the second running. Huge Fun!
After thoroughly enjoyable second runnings through the three morning stages, and many more radiator bleed-and-fills, I delivered Ryan to the finish!
In the end, I was ecstatic to get to run the entire event, bring home a running truck and have had a lot fun in the process. On the bright side I finished with 4wd and working CVs for the first time since Oregon Trial 2005! On the not-so-bright side, I was facing a lot of truck work when I got home.
I was so worn out by the stress and sleep deprivation of the event and days leading up to it that I fell asleep in my drivers suit in a chair in the cabin and slept right through the awards and parties, which I’m actually quite depressed about, since there are many friends I only see at LSPR.
Scott’s story of the weekend is epic and I’ve only told you some of it. Suffice to say he had a gruesome weekend, having to withdraw from the event to go home Saturday, then to add to all this he hit a deer with his truck Saturday night on the way back to Houghton and missed all the parties due to Bambi karate chopping a hole in his radiator. He had to stop many times to keep refilling his radiator the rest of the way to Houghton and all the way back to Minneapolis the next day.
Jim Cox
#558
LSPR is always a butt-kicker, especially mine. I’ve had most of my DNFs at LSPR, and I’m guessing most Central division rally teams would say the same. I finish 95% of my rallys, but before this year, I’d DNF’d at LSPR three times in six days of previous competition. LSPR 06 was unusual for me in many ways.
Many times I’ve come down to the last minute trying to get ready for a rally, unsure if I would get everything done in time to make an event. I usually end up leaving with a big list of important tasks I couldn’t get done. This year I had the luxury of being ready in time and working only on “optional” tasks at the last minute. Also for the first time, I was contemplating withdrawing. I was pretty sure my truck would not finish, and I would turn a rebuildable motor into scrap metal by trying to complete the event. A DNF, especially early in an event wastes my resources and the time invested by my crew and co-driver. I did not feel right heading toward the event under these circumstances. Tuning, oil leaks, coolant in the oil, wildly fluctuating oil pressure, smoke from one bank of cylinders, and other mechanical maladies all had me wondering if I was wise to continue with plans for LSPR 06.
I finally snapped out of it and said to myself:
“I’ve busted my butt to go, schedules, entry and hotel money have been committed, what is the worst thing that can happen? I don’t want to not even try an event just because I MIGHT not finish it. I have no idea how close to death my motor is, many old V8s run for years with no oil pressure and contaminated oil. I’ll take the chance and try to take it easy on my faithful steed.”
The mechanical uncertainty kept me from doing an early co-driver search (I hate the thought of getting a co-driver committed only to have to tell him/her at the last minute that I won’t be going). I also didn’t want to ask strangers to co-drive, since my chance of DNF was high, and I didn’t feel right about having someone travel great distance only to DNF early in the event. So I just checked local folks I knew who would know what they were getting into, all of whom had committed to other teams by this point in time. I almost didn’t register for the event just due to lack of a co-driver, but decided LSPR was too much fun, too close to home, and that I get too depressed when I miss it, so I sent the entry in even though I had no navie. A good friend who usually drives (Scott Parrott) decided to co-drive once I convinced him I didn’t care about our finishing position, we were just going for a fun steady cruise to try to finish with no championship at stake. To minimize losses in case of DNF, I decided to do this event extra cheap by not buying notes, and getting one hotel room for the whole team (cabin).
Things only got more worrisome during the last week before the event. The engine seemed to be getting worse, developing a miss and smoking more, and a hoped-for fix to the oil leakage didn’t work. The cancellation deadline approached; Scott and I decided to go anyway since if we DNF, so be it, we’ll relax, watch cars go by, and enjoy a nice weekend in the UP hanging out at a rally. We packed a few more warm/waterproof clothes, spare fluids and tools in the rally truck than I normally carry, added stop-leak to the radiator and headed north.
The race was on … albeit a bit slowly. I kept my word to Scott about not caring how we competitive we were. Scott was fairly new to co-driving and thus nervous. I wanted to finish with a truck worth rebuilding (not exploded into worthless bits). Our choice not to use stage notes put us at a huge disadvantage. We had almost no chance to win anything, so we focused on fun, took it relatively easy, drove smooth, and avoided high RPM and wide open throttle. I didn’t pay any attention to our times or position in class all weekend, in fact, I didn’t even know where in the results we finished until I looked it up online when I got home. Kinda nice to have that low stress level, I might try it more often.
My conservative pace probably served us well early on Friday. In the drivers meeting, we had been warned of extremely slippery conditions on the first and especially second stages. This turned out to be good advice since many cars went off the road on these stages. Even driving as slow as I ever have, I still managed to have the nearest miss of my career (not counting the time I actually did hit a tree, since that that was not a miss). On SS2 “Bob Lake” the abrupt disappearance of grip on a sharp left took me by surprise and I just could not keep the truck on the crown of the road. I got that sinking feeling you get when physics tells you “you’re going off” and it stops being time to save and starts becoming time to decide the best place to stuff it. We came to a stop less than an inch from hitting two trees at the side of the road. Whew!
Stage notes are addictive. Once you’ve used them then switch back to the route book, you realize how blind you are running only from the tulips in the route book. I don’t think notes are any less safe, but they are easy to misuse, you must be aware of their limitations and choose your pace accordingly. Keeping the same margin of safety, you can go much quicker on notes and you get to function more like a team since the co-driver’s job becomes critical to success and safety. Not having stage notes maginifed the effect of the unpredictable grip on our pace, I ran much slower than usual on Friday.
My fears of the mechanical condition of the truck were validated shortly after the beginning of the event with temps up to 250 and oil pressure as low as 15 lbs. on Herman, the very first stage. I was very worried since the first stage was only 7 miles and I was already in trouble, with the 17 mile high-speed Passmore stage coming up twice later in the evening. I was trying to decide in advance at what temp or oil pressure I would call it quits. I decided if I saw anything less than 5 psi of oil or temp of over 250 F I would shut it down.
Somehow I was still having a great time, I love everything about LSPR, the technical challenge and road variety are awesome. This event always provides excitement regardless of the condition of one’s car. LSPR has everything from rough and slow to tarmac and gravel so fast the scenery gets blurry, and when the scenery isn’t blurry, it’s gorgeous!
At the start of Echo Lake, the last stage before service, I mentally prepared for DNF and vowed to not get crabby or angry when it happened, to keep the whole event fun, regardless of the outcome. As feared, about half way through, the head gasket went from being “leaky” to “completely blown”. The motor then pumped the water jackets full of air until the water pump was pumping only foam. Scott and I were watching the gauges closely and the temp gauge just suddenly snapped to full hot, as fast as a tach needle moves. 265 F is the last number on the gauge, and the needle was well past that. I made a quick decision that any damage was already done and since the motor still sounded and felt fine, I decided to keep going. I backed way off the throttle and just cruised to the stage finish (thinking our crew would have an easier time getting us at the finish and we would have the company of the finish control crew to pass the time). The last miles of the stage seemed to take FOREVER, with the temp just pegged the whole time, oil pressure never over 20 psi.., and me listening for bearing noise and feeling for seizure in the throttle response. We made it to the end, and as soon as I coasted toward the control the oil pressure went to zero, so I kept the RPM up a bit to maintain at least some oil pressure. Getting through that control seemed to take FORVER. Once clear of the control, we pulled over to let it cool and I SLOWLY opened the radiator cap to bleed the air from the cooling system. The night was dead calm, and our large column of steam must have looked like we parked on old faithful. The cooling system bleed also seemed to take FOREVER. It’s interesting to see how some people stop to check on you and some don’t. Not that it’s bad not to stop, I myself certainly can’t always stop to check on others, but I thought it was really cool of those who did check to see if they could help. About ten minutes later, I tried to start it, fully expecting it not to, but it fired right up without horrible bearing noise. We cruised to service where we barely made it on time, pulling up to the control at the end of our minute. I think our crew (mom, dad, and wife) were shocked to see us.
At service in Kenton I replaced the air in the radiator with water, and diluted the coolant in the crankcase with some oil and more stop leak. Ryan Johnson was good enough to give his notes to Scott to try since Ryan’s team had DNF’d. Scott WAS NOT excited about trying the notes. I was convinced he would like it, but didn’t want to pressure him into it, and finally convinced him to try them on the last stage of the day. He did really well, our pace picked up immediately, and I think he enjoyed them and quickly became confident. The swap to running on stage notes made for an interesting experiment, since we got to run the exact same stage on both tulips and notes on the same day, both times in the dark, with the same risk approach used each pass. Doing the math, my pace increased 5% when we switched to the notes, and remember that was Scott’s first time ever reading notes. Notes are clearly a big advantage.
The second run through Passmore wasn’t as troublesome, since I now knew I needed to bleed the air from the cooling system before every stage. This kept us from overheating on all but the longest stages and transits. I really enjoyed this stage since the stage notes allowed us push a bit for the first time while that weekend while at the same time putting less stress on the motor (less acceleration needed with notes, due to less need to slow for corners and crests I couldn’t see past).
We finsihed! I loved my motor for getting through that day but hated it for having the problem in the first place.
Anticipating a DNF, I’d had the crew bring the trailer to service. This helped a lot by allowing us to trailer back to town, keeping almost 100 miles off my ailing motor. Trailering back to town also allowed me to get an extra hour of sleep (while the crew drove me back to Houghton).
However, before we could leave the last MTC in Kenton, we discovered Scott had lost his car keys at some point during the day. So we all traded an hour of sleep for combing the ditches of Kenton for a set of computer-chip-in-them-so-they-can’t-be-duplicated Saab keys.
We eventually gave up and headed back to Houghton while Scott stressed about how he was going to get his car back to Minneapolis. Scott was a VERY good sport all weekend, staying positive in the face of chaos erupting around him. Before going to bed at 3:30AM, we decided to put off until morning the decision as to if we should withdraw from Saturday’s event.
7:30 AM seemed to come earlier than 7:30 ever has. I gave the truck a quick check-over and the motor started and ran fine. Wow. Now what to do? I’d already pushed my luck beyond prudence. The motor had taken a severe thermal beating. Saturday’s high speed stages would strain even a healthy motor to its max and would like cause catastrophic failure to mine. Friday had been tough on the crew, and I almost told them to go back to bed (that I would withdraw from Saturday’s event), but decided it was at least worth going up to park expose where we would have a couple hours to take a closer look at things. We left mom in bed and staggered toward Calumet, thinking we’d be back soon.
Scott decided he had to head back to Minneapolis immediately in order to get his spare car keys, drive back to Houghton, then drive back to Minneapolis AGAIN in time to be back for work on Monday. Scott was not having a good weekend, and it was only going to get worse. My hat is off to him for not having a complete nervous breakdown at some point.
After confirming Rally America would let me withdraw after park expose if need be, I unloaded the rally truck from its trailer and drove into park expose just in time to avoid a penalty. Once in our expose spot, I started frantically working on the truck, Kaari started looking for co-drivers, Scott went to find Ryan to give his stage notes back, and dad made trips back and forth to the service truck to keep me supplied with tools. I did a miserable oil change (that normally requires the skid plates to be removed), refilled the radiator and found more stop leak (thank you Calumet Chevrolet!).
The first cars were leaving, and I still didn’t have a co-driver!
Enter Ryan Johnson and Bob Olson who had DNF’d with a broken driveshaft on Friday. Bob offered Scott a ride back to Minneapolis. THANK YOU Bob! Ryan offered to co-drive for me. THANK YOU Ryan!
I finished up the truck while Ryan ran back to his hotel to retrieve his suit and helmet. We got to the line just in time to take the start.
Now all that mattered to me was getting Ryan a respectable number of stage miles in appreciation for his willingness to step in. However, louder bearing noise, even with fresh oil, had me doubting we’d even finish the first transit.
I REALLY tip my cap to Ryan. After getting out of Bob’s beautiful brand new RX8 rally car, he got in a low-budget, crude, known sick truck, likely to DNF, with a driver he didn’t know, and gave up a day of spectating with his wife. I hope he is happy with his decision, I’m sure he was shocked to eventually cross the finish line, with respectable stage times to boot.
I’d picked up a secret weapon before breakfast that probably saved our race: A radiator cap with a lever to release pressure (Scott’s suggestion). This cut the time required to bleed the air from the cooling system from about 10 minutes to about 1 (and increased the safety of the operation 1000%). The wonder-cap let me bleed air and top up coolant before every stage. We never overheated on Saturday!
Every stage on day 2 of LSPR is epic. Saturday started with the rough and tricky Gratiot Lake. This stage tries to trick you into going to fast by starting with wide roads and grippy sandy soils. Then part way through it instantly changes to narrow and slippery. I marked this transition two years ago by parking against a tree. Dave Cizmas marked the same spot last year. This is the only stage where I’ve ever had an actual violent crash. I always go really slow past that spot now.
I like rough stages. The truck is durable, and should be fast on the rough stages, but it isn’t. None of our MN stages are rough, so LSPR provides valuable tuning data. I learned this weekend that the suspension badly needs tuning and it’s performance on Gratiot, Burma, and others was so poor that even at our conservative pace, the truck bottomed heavily, was uncontrolled, and our times slowed noticeably when compared to other teams. Ryan has ridden in some very good cars and confirmed that the good cars are able to push much harder in the rough than my truck will currently allow.
Stage 2 (Delaware Mine) really showed me how far down on power the motor was, it felt quite sluggish. Ryan was doing a fantastic job, and he had brought stage notes with him!
At service in Copper Harbor, I had a tough decision to make about tires for the upcoming Brockway Mountain tarmac stages. I could continue running my mud tires, which would put a lot of wear on them and not offer much grip, or I could change to my tarmac tires, which are at least 2” shorter than they should be, limiting ground clearance and capping top speed at 110 MPH. I went with the tarmacs (nothing special, just a cheap wide high performance street tire). This was the right choice, because the grip made that stage an absolute blast. The decision had consequences however. We went into a dip at what I thought was a reasonable speed but bottomed the skid plates HARD into the road (later found to have bent the skid plate mounts and pushed the plate against the front diff). After that, I wussed on the rest of the jumps and dips. Proof of this can be seen in the work of all the photographers at the big jump where we were one of very few cars to get no air. I also wussed on the really fast section near the end of the stage to save the motor. As someone who doesn’t ever get to race on tarmac, Brockway is a huge treat for me.
Getting a second stage on Brockway was another huge treat this year, since it allowed us figure out just how fast we could take the various corners, dips and jumps. That let us push much harder on the second running. Huge Fun!
After thoroughly enjoyable second runnings through the three morning stages, and many more radiator bleed-and-fills, I delivered Ryan to the finish!
In the end, I was ecstatic to get to run the entire event, bring home a running truck and have had a lot fun in the process. On the bright side I finished with 4wd and working CVs for the first time since Oregon Trial 2005! On the not-so-bright side, I was facing a lot of truck work when I got home.
I was so worn out by the stress and sleep deprivation of the event and days leading up to it that I fell asleep in my drivers suit in a chair in the cabin and slept right through the awards and parties, which I’m actually quite depressed about, since there are many friends I only see at LSPR.
Scott’s story of the weekend is epic and I’ve only told you some of it. Suffice to say he had a gruesome weekend, having to withdraw from the event to go home Saturday, then to add to all this he hit a deer with his truck Saturday night on the way back to Houghton and missed all the parties due to Bambi karate chopping a hole in his radiator. He had to stop many times to keep refilling his radiator the rest of the way to Houghton and all the way back to Minneapolis the next day.
Jim Cox
#558