Qualifying

Qualifying stage was a 6 mile or so stretch of closed Mexican road, which I found out the day after in the first day of competition can mean practically anything. They say you can’t win if you don’t finish. Well it turns out you definitely can’t win if you roll the car twice in qualifying. That’s what Rachel and I came across pushed off to the side of the road round one corner only a mile or so into the race. A totally destroyed Studebaker on one side of the road and an only slightly rolled Mini off to the other side of the road. The Studebaker had both doors off and heavily crunched wings. That car is an almost total write-off. The Mini on the other hand had hit on the front wings and on top of both corners of the windscreen, but thanks to the roll cage, was more or less ok.

(Pictures courtesy of Bret Haller)

Rachel and I had already decided that this was a section to take it easy, and seeing these cars so early in the stage only encouraged us to do just that. So we were as surprised as anyone when we found ourselves in 16^th after qualifying. Rachel definitely drove the section well, but we were certainly not pushing.

The co-driver’s job turns out to be a total bitch. A normal section of the Rally starts at Checkpoint A, where you are given a start time on a timecard and released into the speed stage. Then things get busy. You have to tell the driver the distance to the next corner, the direction of the corner, and then the grade of the corner, where 0 is pretty much flat out and 4 is a sharp hairpin. The problems arise when you get into a corner complex, and you find yourself saying to the driver: “300 Right 1 into Right 2 into Left 3” while trying to give her the information in a way she can use it. It’s no good giving the Left turn while we are still on the straight, it’s also no good giving her it as we round the end of the Right 2.

So far so good. Now the problem on coming out of the complex of corners is that the next distance measurement is given from the start of the previous complex, not the end. This means that you can be reading “400 to Right 1” when you are only 150 meters from the corner.

On top of that due to the rush job in getting here we don’t have a co pilots odometer or a Terratrip. That means as you are running the stage you are trying to look at the driver’s odo. On the Elise that’s not easy. The alternative is to be watching the corners and trying to match them to the notes, leaving you to try and decide whether the jink in the road is the Right 0 corner or that it didn’t count as a corner at all and the next corner is the Right 0.

After that you blow through the finish (Checkpoint B). The next job of the co-driver is to attempt to get the driver to slow down in time for Checkpoint C where they write down the time you crossed Checkpoint B. You then progress along open roads to the end of the section, obeying (in theory) the speed limit. The end of the section is at checkpoint Z. You have to arrive at Z in the 60 seconds after your start time (from Checkpoint A) plus the stage elapsed time. You get penalized for arriving early or 60 seconds too late. It’s up to the co-driver to tell the driver when to arrive at Z. Usually you arrive early and wait in a line to crawl up at your assigned time. Easy, eh? And the driver only has to drive.

Most of the drivers here are fairly old white guys. The sponsors for the event include Centrum Silver and Viagra. We’ve been given samples of the Centrum Silver but not the Viagra.