"Square left up
the hill," called my co-driver Brian Bourbonniere.
"Check!" I
replied.
I hit the
massively-powerful brakes on our Kia Optima Turbo.
Massively-powerful
brakes are only as good as how massive the grip of the tires happens
to be.
It was our second pass
through the 'John Curran Memorial Stage', formerly known as
'Colliers', which runs between that latter community and Conception
Harbour.
The road was 'Condition
1', meaning dry and clear. ('Condition 2' is wet, 'Condition 3' means
'animals walking two by two'.)
On the first pass I had
noticed patches of water here and there from the rain the night
before, but they didn't seem to pose a problem.
Brian had said we were
OK on time through the first pass - he never tells me exactly how we
are doing, on the well-established theory that the less I know the
better - but he said we could pick it up a little the second time
through.
We approached the
appropriately-named (as it turned out...) Cemetery Road in good
shape. I didn't notice - or didn't precisely remember from our first
run - that a local had left his garden hose running in his driveway,
and the water was running down into the road, right at the braking
point for the corner.
Hence the earlier
comment about the grip.
The ABS kicked in, but
once through the puddle there was gravel on the road, possibly from a
previous excursion.
Even ABS can only do so
much.
It became clear to me
we weren't going to make the corner. Then I noticed in the little
field to my slight-left sat the Mini of the father-and-daughter team
of Don and Skye Sawyer from New York City. They had left exactly a
minute before us, had done exactly the same thing, and were now
sitting in that exact same field.
I really didn't want to
hit their car.
Nor did straightening
out and going smack into the red-taped barrier and possibly involving
some of the course marshals seem wise.
I'm not sure after the
fact whether I really had much influence on our trajectory at this
point.
Surely more by good
luck than good management, I spilt the difference, hit the fence and
the field, but not the Mini.
If the driver tries to take a corner faster than the car can handle, it is clearly driver error. My bad. I felt awful having let the team down.
The question then became - now what?
Once everyone else had
completed the stage, some locals - including the former mayor of
Conception Harbour! - dragged us out. The car looked OK, felt OK, was clearly driveable, but we
felt it wise to head gingerly to the Kia dealership in Clarenville,
about 120 km away, to check it out before re-joining the event.
Turns out the skid
plate (an aluminum plate under the engine compartment) did what it
was designed to do - sacrifice itself to protect the valuable
innards.
Its mounting bracket
was broken, so we simply took the whole thing off.
There was some damage
to the plastic bits under the grille, and I got half-way to
eliminating the dreaded fog lights - the left one is now landfill.
We missed three stages,
but got back in time to run the long and terrifyingly fast Gooseberry
Cove. We took it easy - although we did hit 191 kmh at one point -
because we wanted to make sure the car was OK.
It felt fine.
Unfortunately, the
Sawyers, whose car was not as badly dinged in the Conception Harbour incident as
ours, had another 'off' in that stage, and we had to 'transit' -
drive at non-racing speeds - out.
The short but fast Port
Blandford stage and a long, construction-filled transit took us to
Gander, where we are tonight - Monday.
Tomorrow is another
day.
