2008 Vermont Winter & New England Winter Brisk TSD rally

[Crazyswede]

So Geoff and I attended the 4th running of these rallies on Saturday night. The event is a brisk event that runs from 8pm Saturday night until about 6am Sunday morning. The average speeds are often difficult to maintain and many of the roads are treacherous. This year 4 audi's retired with broken oil pans....we had the 900SE airborne but luckily didnt hit the oil pan.

So the event has run for 4 years and we have run it all 4 years. Every year there are 3 sections. Usualy the 1st and 2nd are combined as one event and the 2nd and 3rd are combined as a second. We have won our class every year and have been in the top three overall. This year we won both rallies in our class and were again 3rd overall. We started as car 38 on the road out of 40 cars. However, by partway through the first section we were about 10th on the road. This is not an all out speed event, its just that the 20 or so cars in front of us had gotten lost where we stayed on course.

We did not have any crashes or off the road incidents and we only had a couple of real exciting wonder if we are going to make it kind of moments. ...Gotta say that the ABS was great and horrible on this event. Great for some horrible corners and bad for some panic stops.

So we add a bunch of nice big glass trophies to the collection and proved that a 2 wheel drive saab can keep up just fine with all the 4 wheel drive cars.

[fiasco]

Ted and I gave up after the second section. We were too tired, had gotten too lost too many times, missed several controls and had to just circle around on main roads to both rest stops. We didn't think anything good was going to come of trying to go another 100 miles at 3am on crappy snow tires in a Camry.

Glad you guys did well, but we just weren't having fun anymore and decided that 2 hours home and to bed was better than 3 hours to the finish then 2.5 hours home. Don't know how you managed to stay on course, we did pretty well last year but just was lost waaaay too much this time. Maybe we need to do more than 1 TSD a year, but everything else I've ever run (except old Gary Webb events) is just painfully slow.

Sounds like rallyho had an interesting night as well. Hopefully the WRX isn't as boat shaped as his old 99 rally car was!

[Geoff]

That stolen Camry with the NH scrap pile light bracket you guys were running was just scary! It's a good thing you didn't do section 3 as there were some HUGE "frost heaves" that could have torn that thing to bits. Mike was saying he had quite the run-in with them (we somehow didn't damage our car other than maybe ruining the strut insets). Maybe a run-in with VT's finest too? hmmm

We actually haven't placed first every year; the first year I think we were second behind some guys who were running a Palm Pilot with custom rally software. That year there was a "slow" speed you could run or a "regular" speed. They ran "slow" and we had a hard time keeping the 3spd NA 900S on "regular" CAS.

[Rallyho]

You guys definately cleaned up...did you say you won some big glass balls?

neat.

yeah, those effing frost heaves farking chucked us into the air good. Then, we were having so much fun doing that I hucked my wive's pos into a snowbank at 42mph....good times.

There were some fun roads in there man...but I need to just face up to the fact that I suck at tsd rally. I don't WANT to go 32 mph...I want to TRY to go 50, get it all wrong, bounce off some sh1t, laugh like a methed-up-monkey and then do it again.

CAS=Completely Asinine Speeds

[Crazyswede]

32? yeah 32 was pretty boring but 43 was a bit more exciting especially when you are trying to make up 20 seconds after getting stuck behind 2 awd cars.