Upcoming 100 Acre Wood

Wow! How do I talk about this one coming up? Shortly after I first moved to St. Louis in the early '70's I put together an interpid band of people who almost understood what rallying was. In 1977 the St. Louis group ran the first "Rally in the 100 Acre Wood" based out of Rolla, MO and running mostly in Dent and Crawford Counties.

Here it is 30 years later and for the first time....I'm going to be a competitor! First I have to thank the committee for letting me off the hook. Second I need to thank my wife who is doing what she and I TOGETHER did for the past years. I'm not allowed to know anything about the course. Although I am assisting in printing ID badges for the workers.

But it's a very weird feeling. I'm the guy who can walk in and out of commissioners offices in Dent, Crawford, Iron and Washington Counties....and in a good year, sometimes Reynolds County! Now my succession team is doing that. I have all the faith in the world in this team.

And it's going to be the biggest and best ever....over 60 entries and the cream of the crop!

We will be running what's called one-pass recce on Thursday. They're going to let us see the roads with the notes so we can supposedly go safer through the woods on Friday and Saturday. Mostly we'll go faster. But it's overdue. Jemba notes are OK, but tweeking them make life so much better.

Justin will be bringing the car over to St. Louis on Wednesday when we will have a Subaru Dealer promotional day at Webster Groves Subaru on Big Bend in Webster Groves, MO. Justin doesn't have a single mile of gravel thrashing in this car and the 100 Acre Wood is ALL gravel. So we're desperately trying to find a place to get maybe an hour on gravel...just so Justin can get into his head what this car will do when he pitches it sideways at 70 miles per hour. We may be doing that as late as Friday morning as it appears now. There's a closed area on a Bison Ranch in Potosi that we can rent. We'll have to see.

Anyway, the weather is scheduled to be warm with moisture in the air, so dust should not be a problem.

Justin and I are on a quest to improve everything. His understanding of what the4 car does as an extension of his butt: my staying on top of the notes and getting used to the differences between him and Matthew (last year's driver); and the crystal clear communication between teammates that just makes this stuff click. We're aware this will not occur overnight. It took Johnson and I a couple of events...but he was patient and talented enough to make it work, and Justin and I finished third in PGT at Sno*Drift, his first snow rally in AWD, so I have every belief that we will stay within ourselves and improve greatly as the weekend progresses.

We have new competition in PGT, 'tho. Stephan Verdier who we've not seen in a couple of years has re-surfaced with Scott Crouch (Tanner Fousts Co-Driver from last season) in PGT. They will be very tough to beat...Matthew will set the pace, and Pat Moro and Travis Hansen will round out the top five. I expect the entire season to see these five vying for class wins every event.

It's going to be a very exciting PGT race this year.

HEY!!!! Congrats to Jermey Wimpey (oh, yeah, his brother the driver, Josh) at Sandblast this weekend. 7th overall! 1st in M2. And this guy's going for a Ph.D.? When does he study? We're racing him next weekend in Missouri. CONGRATS, JEREMY!

Sno*Drift 2007

After worrying that there wouldn't be any snow for Sno*Drift, Mother Nature accomodated the rally community nicely. Except that there was never enough cushion in the ditches, it was absolutely perfect weather for this Winter Classic. Single digit temps when we arrived Thursday night, and on-and-off snow all weekend.

This, of course, made tire choice a nightmare.....do we go on Nokian RSI's which will stick (sorta) on ice, or a more open tread which will shed snow. There seemed to be no right choice. Most stages had both conditions, so you picked on tire and tip-toed through the stage when conditions weren't right....or slid off! The RSI's were the "curve of best fit for us and when we could stay in the icy groove worked excellently. Staying out of the soft stuff was the challenge of the weekend.

Justin was cautious and on a steep learning curve. We went out on the shakedown stage and ran the first miles on the car early Friday morning. There's a vast difference between how Matthew (my '06 driver) learns to do things and how Justin (my '07 driver) learns. Matthew is all trial and error....Justin is calculating and making minor adjustments. Matthew is "over-commit and recover", Justin is "drive within the limits and stretch the limits." An awful lot of the rally "Swedish flick" technique wasn't working here....too icy. you might get the car rotated before the turn, but then you'd sale through the turn into the outside bank. So the "slow is fast" method seemed to save a lot of body damage. It also didn't look very spectacular, but no one's going to apologize to the spectators.

Attrition was at a minimum, too. We were running back about 17th on the road and hardly saw anyone off. Borowicz had a big wreck in his "For Sale" open car (there was always a bad feeling when a race car showed up at a track with "for sale" written on it!), and a few slipped off and got back on, but all-in-all it should leave the entry field pretty much in tact for 100 Acre Wood.

Pat Moro was flat kickin' ass from the start in PGT...several top ten stage times. I suspect his setup worked well for the strange conditions, and Mike Rossey was his usual spot on with the notes. An 8-9 minute off relegated them back to fourth. Too bad, it was going to be a great run. Matthew was having the same difficulties we were...slipping off and understeering. his issues were later resolved as his crew discovered more toe-out than needed. He then got in the groove and gave the crowds the bank thumping excitement they were looking for.

The PGT drive of the day goes to the father-son team of Travis and Terry Hanson. Travis spent some time at Team O'Neill and it showed. They were consistenly fast and right at the edge (as evidenced by several small offs) all weekend. Maybe if they find some HID lights they can be even faster after dark!

But I'm here mostly to talk about Justin. He showed up with ZERO miles on this car. ZERO miles in AWD, and just a couple of snow rallies on his VW Golf and Austin Mini. It was like going to driver's school. We made three passes of the three-mile shakedown stage and that was it. Started the rally. It was interesting watching him get used to 3 turns lock-to-lock! This Formula driver is more used to 30 degrees lock-to-lock! So there was a lot of exaggerated steering efforts for awhile. Then a lot of over-correcting. He was actually laughing while sliding around some of the corners. But by Saturday, that was all under control. We actually took the sixth fastest time on one stage.

So. Put a great driver in an average car and give him 100 miles to learn about it and bingo! You've got a third place podium finish. An added plus is the minimal damage compared to our fellow PGT racers!

What did we learn? That we'll have Yokohamas next year. That we're still sorting out car setup and it will be totally different for 100AW. That the VSS signal feeding the Terratrip is random at best and we actually don't need an odometer! That REAL cold PGT cars running on 100+ octane fuel don't start when it's 0 degrees fahrenheit. That the food at the Lewsiton Lodge is still terrific! That Justin will be in the hunt and will be giving PGT regulars fits all year!

GREAT video from Targa Newfoundland

I've just GOT to do this one of these years.....hey Justin!!!!!! Don't EVER sell the mini!

Read the neat Hemmings article....

or take a ride!

Wilson/Orr complete a great developmental season

Michael Orr (on the right) at nearly double the age of his driver Matthew Wilson (on the left....and THAT'S an interesting ratio!), the offspring of Stobart M-Sport Ford Rally Team boss Malcolm Wilson have put together a true training year for the youngster. The team was on a mission to improve all season....keeping points and placements as secondary. And improve they did....a great article here on the duo.


It is very important to note that Orr discusses how the duo placed improvement over accomplishment during the season, and how pleased he and team bosses were with their stats.

Ari Vatanen/Fabrizia Pons doing DAKAR. Trust is everything.

From this article

"For Vatanen, the importance of making fewer mistakes than the opposition is the key to success in the Dakar. With his 20 years of experience, Ari knows that no team or driver will be entirely incident-free over the 16-day, 9,000km event, so it is the degrees of error that will make the difference between first and second. For this reason Dakar is unique in the importance of the co-driver's role.

The rest is Dakar In '07, Italian Fabrizia Pons will take the seat next to Ari and he does not underestimate how vital her role is. "It's essential to have someone next to me who I can trust because otherwise you know that you are only fighting for third or fourth place. Co-driving in Dakar is more important than in any other event. Even a top co-driver will get lost a couple of times in a rally but the difference is will you lose two minutes or 15 minutes."

How indispensible are co-drivers? And let's remember Vatanen is 54 years old! These guys (and gals) are awesome!

VW Prepares for DAKAR. GREAT CO-DRIVER STUFF!

Co-drivers are great repositories for data. They gather if from all possible sources and acrchive for they never know when it will come in handy! Click in the image below to go to the article......

The "OFF SEASON"

Wild West is over. I really thank Jamie Thomas for allowing me to ballast the right side of her car for that event which allowed me to accumulate a few more points and gain the fourth overall position as a US Co-Driver. Matthew Johnson and I had sewn up the PGT Championship effectively after Tanner Foust's bad off at Colorado Cog in September.

I want to say that in my opinion (and I haven't had the privilege of co-driving for Travis or Ken or Dedo or Matt), Matthew is the best "driver" in US Rallying today. He gets more out of a Production Subaru than is possible. His finishes and stage times were ALWAYS superior to GrN cars, and the list of top 5 finishes overall this year is unparalleled. He deserves a funded Open ride. I'm honored to have assisted in this year's success.

And while I'm at it...I want to thank our fellow competitors in PGT. I've never raced with such complete gentlemen in all of motorsport. Had Eric Langbein not towed us into Wellsboro in the middle of STPR we never would have finished the tranny swap in time. And had Tanner Foust not given us push starts with our missing first gear at Cog, we never would have gotten off the uphill starts. These two exhibitions of sportsmanship and camraderie alone make the class worth running in. Thank you gentlemen. You make the sport what it is today.

Wild West rally was kind of a bust....rain had washed away most of the permissions to use the stage roads we'd expected. But John Forespring and his intrepid committee put together some fun stuff for us to do and we ended up racing about 28 stage miles...most of them at the old Seattle International Raceway. Fortunately Jamie had been to two driver's schools there and she was flyin'!

So now it's the "Off-Season" which in American Rally is about 8 weeks!

But a lot has transpired and we're only in the second week of the Off-Season!

First, and the press release will go out in the next day or so....Matthew and I are breaking up. Yes, it's true....but it has nothing to do with anything more sinister than he wants to run with Jeremy Wimpey (Eric Langbein's co-driver for the '06 season) and I want to co-drive for Justin Pritchard (in Eric Langbein's old WRX). So that little tidbit will hit the news soon.

How did this come about? I have always told Justin that if he ever got out of that silly open-wheel racing he's been doing for the past ten years and got SERIOUS about rallying that I would want to help him get to the top. Justin has rallied a pick-up truck, a 1966 mini, a non-descript VW Golf and a 1976 Ford Escort...but never anything with all four wheels pulling! The recent Subaru contingency announcement has many US drivers thinking of running in the PGT class for 2007 (click here for more info). Justin's racing experience coupled with his rally stage miles over the past 4 seasons make him an odds-on favorite to challenge this year's PGT Champ, my '06 ride, Matthew Johnson.

So I get to run up at the pointy end of the stick again!!!

Running with Matthew this season (we won 5 out of 6 races....even sat on the overall podium for Ojibwe with Travis Pastrana and Matt Iorio) was the confirmation of my saying that "Old age and wisdom COUPLED with youth and skill is unbeatable."

So this year may break down to the "young guys" vs. "the old guys", 'cuz Justin's pushing 40! And I'm....well....I'm........uh..........wise!