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November 2001

November 1

I am going to make an attempt to ignore what is going on in the world at the moment as it is too depressing. In actual fact, todays entry is going to be a short one because I am very busy with Rally. I will give you guys an update probably on Monday 5th.
Ciao for now!

November 5

Well.... I'm just a little bit STUFFED!
But then, thats nothing unusual for the day after Rally Aus.
It has a tendancy to do that to me, don't know why! Maybe its the long stretches of driving I have to do, but more likely its the complete lack of sleep I get over the event.
Actually, this year wasn't as bad as some years, as I got to sleep in on Saturday morning 'till 7am.
My schedule was this - Thursday at Langley Park (Perth City center) in the evening for the start of the racing. Friday I went to work in the morning before heading up Mundaring (50km East of Perth) in the afternoon and then back to Langley in the evening. Saturday I headed south to Collie (200km South of Perth) where we had the most unusual regroup. Back up to Langley in the evening for the final super special stage before driving straight down to Sotico near North Banister (Not really a town, more like a roadhouse, 170km SouthEast of Perth). I got there at 1am, and after three hours of sleep in the van later I was back into it, getting ready for the final leg of the event.
I finished up at Sotico at 3pm and headed back to Perth to catch the last of the cars going over the podium at the finnish.

Collie Regroup -
For those who don't follow car rallying, the cars do not race together, they race individually against the clock. This is called a special Stage. The sections between the flat out racing stage is called a transport stage. In a transport stage the vehicles have a set time to go from one point to another. This is timed down to the minute rather than the tenth of a second. If they do not arrive through a control point anywhere in that minute they incur a time penalty. A regroup is part of a transport stage designed to get rid of the gaps in the running order. For example, if the cars are supposed to be two minutes apart and a couple of cars have problems then the gap between some cars will start to increase. The regroup allows the rally organizer to squash out the gaps, but, it is also important to keep the running order.
The drivers will more or less do that anyway, because they do not want to collect a time penalty, they will sit 25metres outside the control and wait till their time.

Collie was a little unusual because the stage immediatly before it was cancelled due to the first car hitting a tree.
Unfortunately, the first six drivers were already on the stage when they cancelled it.
This led to the drivers arriving from car seven onwards, and it wasn't until car 36 that the top drivers started to arrive. So we had to regroup the cars outside the regroup and wait until we could get them in in order.
The townsfolk of Collie were treated to the best view of the cars and drivers as they were basically left in the street until we could check them in.

©juslooken 2001

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