Winter Trial Day 4: Good with the Bad
- February 1, 2012
- Porsche 911 Rally, TwinSpark Porsche Parts, Winter Trial Rally
- Posted by Rick Bruins
- Comments Off on Winter Trial Day 4: Good with the Bad
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 the day, I was blissfully pounding down the indicated road, only to find that at the indicated distance there were very different names by the side of the road compared to the road book! So we blasted along for 30 minutes in the wrong direction.
The good news for the driver is that he gets to prove his skill in getting to the right place in a ridiculously short amount of time. The Bad News for the team is that we got 23 penalty minutes for checking in late at the designated timing point in Austria. All in the game, but definitely avoidable. And worse, it makes for a very short lunch break. And we still needed to add fuel. Bit of a panic day.
We ran 4 regularities today and aced 3 of them, but the 4th one was difficult from the start. After 800 metres, we entered a road which turned out wrong and we still believe the map had a discrepancy, but by the time we found the problem we had to drive at the speed of light to make our bogey time, so that must have cost us another 15 minutes at least. At the hotel we found out we were in good company having stuffed up the stage, so that mitigated the frustration somewhat.
Our stages were tricky with lots of ice and snow. There is so much salt on the dry sections, that even they become slippery as evening starts to fall. It’s like driving with a bit of sand on a race track. A few hairy moments were converted just in time!
Winter Trial 2012 Test 4
winter Trial 2012 Test 3
We passed two handling tests today. One was driven at the Red Bull Ring in Zeltweg and the other at the Driver Training Center of OAMTC in St Veith in Austria. As you can judge from the videos (links above), there were some very tricky ice patches positioned strategically in the corners and we fell for a few of those as well. As the impact on the standings of this type of test is limited, I enjoy going for the edges of the envelope and that means you sometimes cross the line. Great fun though to dig into all the capabilities the rally car has to offer. I need to let out a bit of pressure from the front tires tomorrow as I have a bit too much understeer compared to last year.
Gijs van Lennep, two time Le Mans Winner for Porsche and TwinSpark’s patron, is leading the rally once more, with star-navigator Ian Tullie. Ian is a real champion, having won the European Historic Rally championship for Navigators by just winning every one of the 4 events he ran in. He collected so many point doing that, that he didn’t need to enter in any other ones to win the championship.