Again one rally event has passed. This time – Tartu
sugis 2004, which was held in Otepaa region, where in the beginning of this
year, sports cars rally Esti Talv 2004 took place. At that time sportsmen
said that it was a tuff rally. Only this time the race went on at night. Our
starting time was 8:43pm and we finished just before 7 in the morning. Our
start number was 50.
We are very satisfied with the rally as a whole. The
track was very interesting with a lot of jumps and tight corners and corners
in jumps! Kept us working at all times!
The very start. In the first stage before the first
shikane I started to brake too late + it was very slippy and we hit a big
tire and had a little jump. We hit it with the left front end of the car.
Luckily the lights were still on and it didn’t harm my tires (they sometimes
get loose and then flat).
The hardest part only began. Waiting in the line before
SS3 we lost the all lights. The light switch broke and we couldn’t turn them
on. It is a quite common problem to this kind of cars but it just wasn’t the
right moment. If you hit it hard enough it sometimes turned on but it just
wasn’t enough. But we couldn’t drive fast because you never knew when the
lights will go off. And it happened before one shikane. The only thing I
could do is to hold the flash-brights switch on with my left hand. It wasn’t
that easy because then I had to steer and switch gears with one hand. After
that we somehow fixed it with a wire, causing a shortcut (without the help
of the light switch). I called guys here in Latvia in the middle of the
night to ask which wires to connect. They looked up in schematics and helped
me out. So we went with that wire but as it appeared later it wasn’t any
better. Well it was but still there were some interruptions. Because that
wire was a little bit too big for those holes in the car and it didn’t want
to go in properly.
In the leg 4 which was the last one we started to have
problems with sleep. It was already 4 or 5 in the morning. And to make it
even harder we woke up early morning to get all the race documents and to do
the reconnaissance. We had to wait before stage starts some 15 minutes or so
because of the lines and during that time it was hard to fight with the
sleep because there wasn’t anything much to do than wait. Once the stage got
started the sleep was gone.
We didn’t like the stage 8 and 11 where the road went
in some kind of a forest. It was very fast and that’s why there were stupid
shikanes which you had to pass going off the road. As you can imagine 150
cars going at full speed some place where is no road – it was bumpy as hell.
Because we didn’t want to harm our car, we went slowly there. The result
wasn’t surprising but in the other hand – if we had gone faster in that
stage – maybe we would broke our car and didn’t finidsh at all.
Conclusion: this was our first Estonian rally and we
will come back that’s for sure. They have more interesting rallies there
than we do in Latvia.
Results: 23rd place out of 129 absolute and
7th place out of 16 in 4WD group. Plus the first 6 places got
Subaru Impreza and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo owners.
|