Oh, Olympus. Why are you so difficult?
Mr. Darrow graciously invited me out to hang with him and the Primitive Racing gentlemen for a very fine Olympus Rally weekend. It was the start of my Spring Break and the weather was great so, what could go wrong?
Turns out, a few things. Recce was as boring as ever but seemed to go fine and we re-used some notes from last year when possible. We're still working on consistency and distances so I should probably get better at those things but I think the notes were pretty good for where the team is at the moment. The preparations complete, we worked on building confidence in day 1. Schafer and Deckerville had the most solid notes so the morning loop was good to get through those twice with some solid mid-pack times before heading to the dreaded Wildcat. To add a little to our trepidation over this stage, in the service after the second loop, Blake and Joel found a wheel bearing problem and sorted it out with just seconds to spare before a time penalty the second loop.
Wildcat is a pretty notorious car-breaker and we saw a number of wounded rally cars as we navigated the longest stage of the day. Safely through on a pretty conservative run, we headed back to service without much of a care. Unfortunately, the boys found a leaking brake line and that the turbo wastegate connection had separated. Both of those things are pretty bad. With only a 30 minute service and without a spare v-band connector for the wastegate the team had to extend the work past our maximum permitted lateness and, unfortunately, we had to retire for the day.
The crew finished things up relatively early in the evening and we started Day 2 ready to have fun. The first loop of Stillwater and Dayton went well and we felt really confident through Dayton with a good rhythm and continued to improve our times. Stage 9 saw us nearly crack top 10 regionally and confidence was building. About 1.5 miles before the end of the second running of Dayton, Pat felt something change in the car and braking became an absolute cacophony of shudders and crackles by the end of the stage. We feared that something suspension-wise had broken but as we pulled to the side of the transit to diagnose, we found a few sheared off bolts from the left rear rotor/hub assembly. The brake caliper had lost both the mounting bolts as well. Finding the issue took some time and then we put in a valiant effort to rescue the brakes to attempt the final stage. I even did some mechanicing, which is never a great idea. Pat scaveneged bolts from the front lower bumper cover thing to put most of the rotor/hub back together, we had a spare bolt to keep the caliper on at least 50% and as we sealed it up had maybe just enough time to get the last stage in. However the fix failed on the first test of the braking system and the brake line was ejected from the caliper as it disconnected again. We probably should have thought of just removing the caliper and using front brakes only on the last stage but we really wanted all the brakes! Anyhow, after the second failure, we handed our time card to the nice sweep team behind us, clamped the leaky brake line with a pair of vice grips and drove straight back to service on what the kids on TikTok are calling the "no brake challenge" I'm sure. (We had front brakes but chose not to use them).
As always, Olympus, it was an adventure and, like most of my visits to the Olympic Peninsula to battle this rally, it ended in a bit of disappointment but overall a good time. See you next year, maybe.