Event Report

Recce - Thursday and Friday
Nice change doing recce on roads we know quite well. Thursday morning was a little cold, somewhere around -6 celcius. Headed off to the Fairbairn Park Super Special Stage after dropping off the Corolla at scrutineering at around 7.30am. Our service crew (Geoff and Henry) would take the car through scrutineering for us later in the day.

The Controllies were all friendly and many had hot food and drinks for us as we prepared our pacenotes. Much appreciated!

No dramas over the course, but heard stories of other competitors with multiple flat tyres and encounters with kangaroos.

Garema Place - Ceremonial Start - Friday night
Well organised and plenty of spectators. The schedule was out of whack as the organisers closed the gap between cars down to 30 seconds. The AWD Magna driven by Ross Dunkerton certainly got the lion's share of the media coverage.

Servicing
Henry Lemmon and Geoff Stewart once again doing what they do so well.

The service park was at the Sutton Road Driver Training Complex, which worked very well, particularly as it was adjacent to the Super Special Stage.

General Comments
ROC 2004 represented an opportunity to mix it with a high class field, get to pacenote local roads and see how competitve we were with the new RS Subaru field. The other nice thing about the National event was that we had the bonus of knowing a lot of the competitors around us which adds to the fun.

Running at Car 7 in the National field was a good seeding for us. What we did not realise was the work it was going to take to keep up to the position. Well it did not take us long to work out that the stage times happening behind us were really red hot. The likes of the Proton of Doug Wright, The Levin, Wagi's RS2000, Spac in the RX-7 and Dave in the RX were taking time out of us left right and centre.

One of the issues we faced over the weekend was the brakes setup. On Saturday we ran with "no boost" to supposedly improve consistency of braking. The downside of this setup made for an extremely hard pedal with delayed reaction time. This proved costly to our efforts soaking up time on the heavy braking cautioned corners. Sunday we put the boost back on allowing us more confidence in the parts that could be attacked.

The roads were very cut up (understatement) in the Greenhills and Bluetts stages. The 4wd cut up of the roads had the effect of forcing the our car to slide through deep wheeltracks in thick bulldust, not knowing where the rocks might be hidden. On a handful of corners you were presented with the option of driving over very large or just plain large sharp sided rocks. Not a good situation but there was not much of a choice. The view of Greenhills was awesome to behold from a distance. Obviously rally cars going berserk in the forest is bound to raise a bit of dust but the way it just hung made the scene worthy of the presence of a CNN news crew being on location rather CH10 just doing a motorsport coverage. The 2nd pass of Greenhills was eery, a thin blanket of dust hovered above the road just enough to see under it, and could easily see over but problem was we could not see through it, this caused us to pull up to snails pace a few times due to not being able to judge distance properly. The other roads were good, favourites being Main Tower, Lowden, East West and Kowen Rd.

SS1/9 Greenhills - losing intercom half way fiddling around while driving competitively and then getting back on the notes after the distraction. Second time around we were due to start on the change of light but the spots proved useless - would have been better off without them! Ironically was our 5th best stage.
SS2 Lees Padovan - losing intercom again, different reason, but not for as long. CH10 photographers got no value out of us as we putted through the 2 x !!!humps where Scott Pedder had launched his car off. Overall was our poorest stage.
SS3/7 Bluetts1 as expected this was a tricky stage demonstrated by the fact that Urquhart went off at a point where during recce it was clear someone would pick that spot to come to grief. We nailed the spectator point adjacent to the concrete barrier. On the 2nd run we felt slower but as is always the case proved to be our 3rd best stage.
SS4 Oakey Creek the main mistake here was that we went wide with our tail off the crown of the road at a 3R which took us half into a gutter which was full of soft fluffy bulldust - lucky not to hit a rock or get stuck - respectable result though.
SS5 Mineshaft long - we flatted the L front but did not know it straightaway because of the cushioning bulldust factor. While we lost time driving on the flat, and in the performance of a slow change in stage, probably 6 mins all up. We notched up a "proud last" for this stage, although we attacked the Mineshaft itself with plenty of gusto, but no 'air'.
SS10 and 13 Kowen Rd - very nice drive not the rough crap it could have been, on the 1st pass we (JP) miscalculated the notes at the end of a long stretch of flat crests and open straights, this was dangerous due to having obscured vision from catching the dust of car115 Escort C4. This was our best result of the event even though we were low on grunt. 2nd pass (slightly slower than the 1st) could have been the best drive of the event but again we were severely hampered by car115's dust, who by this stage was just driving to finish.
SS6/14 Fairburn Park - 1st time around we were hosed by Doug Wright in the Proton, but we had our revenge on Sunday only losing by 1/10 to the sexier, more fancied 131 Fiat Arbarth driven by Stuart MacLachlan.
SS11 Lowden - mostly good except needed more rhythm and flow in the latter part of the stage where the road opens onto the fast shire stuff.
SS12 Main Tower - what a delight ! - well worth the long transport to get there.

Another rally run and finished is a great feeling, although we had mixed feelings at the end of the event. We competed to the best of our ability and finished and in so doing achieved our objective and were happy with the overall result. However we were a little disappointed with our stage times relative to others, but hey, being there and in it was a hoot. Greg said at one point "If we didn't know any of the times of cars we would have thought we were running red hot".
John Paul De Sousa

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