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20 August 2007 - Everything That Could Go Wrong...Goes Right?
Josh Chang/Alex Kihurani finish Top 5 in Ojibwe Forest Pro Rally!
If you recall from my last article, my plan for the Ojibwe Forest Rally was to pack up for Penn State the week leading up to the rally, leave my home at 4:30am to catch my flight to Minneapolis, run the rally with Josh Chang (who just finished putting the engine in the car the week before), and then possibly make my 6am flight home (it’s a 4 hour drive from the host town) or go stand-by and hope I make a different flight, then load up my car, drive 200 miles to school, move into my apartment, go to bed, and go to class, buy books, etc. the following day. Considering my luck last year with trying to fly home from a rally and move in the same day (both cars broke down on the way to school!), I wasn’t too optimistic.
My plane arrives at MSP *early* in heavy fog...so heavy that the flight I wanted to Bemidji (but for which tickets were too expensive) was cancelled. Lucky me. I get picked up, arrive at the practice stage to the sight of no Josh because the car still isn’t totally together yet. Figures. At this point, I’m just hoping we can run and have some fun. I hop in with Heath Nunnemacher for a run on the stage, and give him a couple pointers as well as trying to help him figure out what more he needs from his co-driver mom. The session is surprisingly productive, and I leave feeling pretty good despite wondering if I’ll even get to start the rally.
Because Josh rolled at STPR, he had to take the car apart and rebuild a large portion of it. How he’s been able to rebuild so much of it in so little time is beyond me and definitely a little ambitious on his part. Of course, with any rebuild, there’s always a screw here and a wire there that’s neglected. I climb into the car and close the door to go for a quick spin with Josh and adjust the belts. When I go to climb out of the car, the door handle breaks and I can’t get out. Then while fixing the door handle, the automatic window stops working. Once they figure that out, the lights don’t sit right in the pod, they lights need springs and adjustment screws, the wiring for the two corners is faulty, my map light and rally computer aren’t working, and the ECU mapping is bogus...not to mention a million other little things. After a night and a morning of running back and forth to the hardware store, the car is in good enough shape for tech and passes quickly to our relief.
Before heading to the Bemidji Speedway Friday afternoon for the first spectator stage, Josh finally decides to try Pat Richard’s ECU mapping. On the transit we realize it sucks more than the conservative mapping that limits the car to 15lbs of boost. Ok, the rally is about to start, and we have next to no power or torque; however, the Speedway stage is run in reverse order and luckily, due to our poor speed factor, we get to go first and then come in to Parc Expose for a long time to wait for everyone to finish the stage and then be released from MTC Out at 1-2 min intervals. Sweet. I reccomend to Josh that he could try to BS a more aggressive mapping based on the conservative ECU map, and if it sucks on the spectator stage, we can just change it back before heading out to the real stages.
Josh gets busy on his ECU mapping, loads it into the car, and we run the stage. The car lacks a little top end but it’s extremely torquey and as fast as it’ll ever be on the twisty stuff. Amazing! We leave it on and head to the first stage.
First stage starts a little slowly but cleanly. Josh starts upping the pace a little more towards the end of the short test, and we make up 20-30 seconds over 5 miles on the car ahead of us and finish on the same minute. We know we’ll catch him on the 15 miler next, but the car ahead won’t agree to let us pass in the control...so we’re stuck. Josh starts pushing hard through the stage, committing totally to the notes through the dust, and within the first 10 miles we catch the car ahead and are able to make a pass in a damper, shaded area. We continue moving up the order through the next stage and jump from 27th to 12th by the first service even with our dust issues. Josh is running his best ever and we’re both shocked how well we’re doing with this BS’d ECU!
At service we first attempt to mount our lights...another Josh Chang Special fabricated on site this weekend. The crew plugs them in, turns them on, and the fuse melts instantly. We take a fuse from the truck to replace it, the crew finds the problem, and now the lights turn on but a cornering beam is out. The crew finds the faulty wiring and hardwires the cornering beam with some good ole’ electrical tape. We do some B.S. light pointing to the extent of our last-minute hardware, and we’re “good to go” for our 40+ miles of night rallying with no service.
We get on stage, everything works perfectly including the pointing of the lights, except my map light goes out...but I quickly turn on my headlamp so Josh didn’t even know, and we catch two people and see Kenny rolled off in the trees. Now we’re inside the top 10 in 9th overall and can’t even believe it.
As all of us get ready to roll into bed, Josh gets on the phone with Pat Richard to see if he can help him with the ECU. After 2-3 hours of driving up and down the road and trying different settings with the laptop, Josh has a setting he’s happy with and rolls into bed near 3am.
Day 2 and we’re tired from 5 guys sleeping in the room with 2 full beds (not queen size!). It’s hot and dusty, and we’re still on one minute intervals. Dust isn’t bad on the first stage, and our time is decent. On the second, 16 mile stage we begin to catch Penasack who was reseeded ahead of us after going off (again, because of our low speed factor) and we push through some scary dust in the fast, cresty, tricky last section of the stage. We lose some time to Kyle Sarasin in the Focus but then make some time up on him on the next two stages. We go into the final service in 8th after Cary Kendall pulled over with a mechanical DNF, 10 seconds behind Kyle.
At service, I find out the Jamaican co-driver Hugh Hutchinson has an early flight out of MSP also and can give me a ride to the airport...and I thought I was going to have to go standby! By the end of service we decide we’ll drive steady and try to make up the additional 10 seconds on Kyle, and if it’s not happening by the last stage we’ll just back off and make sure we collect our $1250 in Group N money.
The first two stages out of service feel slow. The combination of heavy dust and the setting sun make driving in a straight line hard. However, Kyle is slower and we take over 7th going into the last stage...and now we have a tough decision to make.
See, Josh has had a recent reputation of going off on the last stage and not getting to collect his Group N money or having the accident damages equal more than twice the Group N money he gets...so we decide pushing for 7th from 8th really isn’t all that worth it.
We start the stage going steady and tell Josh he should even push a little harder so that he isn’t losing focus. We pass Penasack who’s limping. Then, about halfway through the stage, we see Verdier off by the edge of a lake. Then a little further up the road we see Tanner Faust off on the side of the road...and Josh suddenly realizes “SHIT, I COULD GET FIFTH!” and starts pushing, but he’s not doing anything stupid yet. Then, he taps the windshield wipers which spread dust all over the windsheild and he starts getting preoccupied trying to clean the windshield and turn the wipers off at the precise correct time so that they don’t stop in the middle. By this time, the car is all over the road and after a quick excursion into a grassy field with less than 4 miles to go, I exchange a few choice words with Josh to make sure we bring the car home safely.
...And you wouldn’t believe how happy we were when we crossed the finish line. We eagerly go up to Kyle to see what his time was. He beat us, but it’s ok. 6th is fine.
We start celebrating right away, and at the party we find out a protest against Piotr puts us in 5th! We can’t believe out of nowhere we scored a top 5 that has everyone going “Josh Chang who?!?” after starting down in near 30th place with a car that was barely together. The storyline is almost sappy.
In rallying, it always seems that everything than can go wrong, does go wrong...this weekend, everything that should have went wrong, went completely right, and I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend or result.
So at the end of the party, I hop in the car with Hugh who takes me to the airport. We arrive at 6am, my plane leaves at 7am, and I arrive in Philly at 10:30am. By the time I get my bags and get home it’s 11:30am. I sleep until 2:30pm, load up the car, and leave for school at 3pm, arrive at 6:30pm, move into my apartment, greet my roommates and hang out in the back yard with the friends and neighbors I haven't seen all summer, grab some groceries, and by midnight I’m worn out and ready for a well deserved night of sleep before my first day of class. Whew!
-Alex