Category: Porsche 911 Rally

Today was a tough day… We managed to climb 8 positions since yesterday, but there is no rest for the rally driver!

We ran our regularity in the morning and came out feeling invincible. As we headed South to the next stage we missed a turn to the Time Check. I still remember looking at Kenneth Tjon in his 1976 924 Porsche taking a right and wondering why he went the other way, as he looked at me, wondering where the heck I was going… The short end of it was : we weren’t paying enough attention to the road numbers!

Each year we have a “driver, follow that road-moment”. The co-driver decides there is a large stretch on a single road coming up and tells the driver to keep going straight. As Joost was doing his mapping work for [...]

What a beautiful day we just finished! It had all the ingredients you look for in a historic rally in wintertime. Several tough regularities that seemed easier than they turned out to be: we fell for at least two traps the organisers had set for us, and the police and beginners did the rest!

Several competitors were stopped by concealed policemen and we got trapped behind a rookie car which cost us 4 minutes, but that’s all part of events like these. I just learned that the leaders in the trial class were held up by a lower classed car that decided it needed to put on snow chains: there will allegedly be a red- haired scalp dangling from the front door of the hotel in the morning!

We passed through Germany into Austria, finishing in Schladming at the foot [...]

Under grey skies we entered the Black Forest, where we encountered the first heavy snow cover.

Gorgeous landscape and great driving roads. Somewhat icy remnants on the road made for fingertip handling of the steering wheel to nurse Silverado downhill. We ran three regularities today and had a few misses which were partly recovered. The field was very close after yesterday, but today the last regularity seems to be keeping many people busy, as it’s somewhat quiet in the bar. Here’s a link to some video:

Winter Trial 2012 Test 1

We took off in 24th position, due to my mistake on the first test, but because the first day was not very challenging, the field was very close together. We had 5 minutes between number 1 and ourselves. In this rally damage is usually measured in hours in the end, so we plod away and hope to make fewer mistakes than others.

To avoid [...]