Into the Silverdome this morning at an alarming 0600, complete with all our luggage. Sunrise is beautiful here, but we hadn't expected to see it quite so often! It's a huge day, definitely the hardest of the whole event, 550 road kilometres including 8 stages, ending up in the small south-western port of Strahan, where the arrival of the event trebles the population for a few hours.
We ran Cethana Stage, which is the same road as Mt Roland, which we had run yesterday, but today run in the opposite direction, and with another 10kms tacked onto the end of it, this is simply brilliant, lots of very fast stuff over the top of the mountain but also some twisty bits too. Towards the end there was another long climb and the car was feeling (actually smelling) tired and hot, so i backed off a touch. The end of Cethana stage marks the mid-way point of the competitive stage kilometres, so there is still a very long way to go, and the car is tired, so it is worth our while to ease up occasionally to preserve the car.
A short stage and then on to Riana, another signature stage. A long climb, then some open flowing stages on the top, then dropping down into a gorge (where the recent heavy rain had damaged the road so a short section was limited to 40kmh). A one point there is a left turn at a junction, with the road dropping away slightly, and it's a favourite spot for photographers, I wanted a good snap but I went over it a bit more aggressively than I'd intended ... Managed to collect the car on landing, although it was a bit squirrelly! Just hope they got the shot, we'll find out later. We got overtaken by three cars on this stages, each one delaying us slightly, and in one case the car overtook us on a twisty section, but then we had a long climb and a flowing section where we would have been quicker.
Into each car at this event the organisers have attached some funky box of tricks called Rallysafe, which gives stage times and distances etc., and lots of other functions, but it's main purpose is safety. It will give you a caption on the screen if a car closes to less than 200m behind, so that you can look to help him overtake (if the Nav presses a button a message is transmitted back to the approaching car acknowledging his presence); if the car comes to a stop on stage the box instantly transmits an SOS message, to which you can then adjust to 'OK' or validate the 'SOS', following cars will pick up the message, and the first three on the scene are expected to stop. We know it works, because immediately we came to a stop in our 'off' on Wednesday the box was transmitting. It's an impressive system once they get it working, but there have been a lot of teething troubles during this event. Well, during the Riana stage we got an SOS message come up, so we backed off for a couple of minutes expecting to find a car off, nothing was seen, and when another car approached and overtook we assumed the message was spurious, and we upped the pace again. At the end of this stage, despite feeling like we'd gone well, we had missed our Trophy Time for the first time, by a mere 9 seconds. However having approached the organisers they have agreed to discount 30 secs for this stage time, in recognition of the RallySafe issue, so we are back on Trophy again. It transpires that a number of cars just missed Trophy Time on this stage, and have put in requests to the organisers for adjustment due to the short speed limited section which was not taken into account in the Trophy Time.
After lunch there was a serious threat of rain in the air, and we were lucky to get through the Hellyer Gorge stage before the drizzle turned to proper rain. But that was the last dry stage of the day. Rain was something that I'd been dreading... although the tyres we're using are quite good in the rain, these were pretty well-used by now! I'd got into some rhythm in the dry, and didn't really want to go back down the learning curve. Still rain is what we got, so here goes...
Mt Black, Rosebery and then the Rinnadinna stage down into Strahan. Both Mt Black and Rosebery were fairly major road, by local standards, still twisty, but wider and not so tight - would have been very fast if dry. But it wasn't, it was wet and very slippery in places, with treacherous surface changes and White lines well worth avoiding. Three cars were off with 100m of each other on Rosebery before we went through, including the Ford V8 Pilot being driven as the ceremonial #1 car that opens each stage, it lost a rear wing in the accident, so some wag came up with the idea that it should henceforth be called Car #3/4! When you add the slipperiness to the fact that TR wipers are useless, and the car will steam up whilst we await the start of stages, it all became a bit of a daunting challenge. I didn't enjoy any of these stages to be honest, but was pleased to hit Trophy Time (which is adjusted for wet or intermediate conditions).
Into Strahan, very tired, but so is the car, we had to bleed the clutch, still in my race suit under the car, in the rain ... It's supposed to be fun! Serviced the car, parked it in Parc Ferme, then showered and headed back to the centre of the village, where the atmosphere was really good, big fireworks display on the harbour too. We have survived Day 4, quite a good number didn't, or had delays after offs.
One day to go.... Still on for a Trophy, we think (we know we've hit the stage times, but we're still a bit confused about the road times - but we think we are still clean...) All our buddies still running too.
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