I see that 409industries is doing this over at dirtyimpreza.com too (we're in the same class and I'm crashing on his hotel room floor), but I'd decided to do it before I saw his blog, so I don't feel like too much of a copycat. Day -1 Flew out to Manchester NH a day early because it saved around $500 on the airfare. Northworst, so if I wanted to check a bag it's $15, each way. So I haul all of my gear all over the airport and get to the gate just in time to join the tail end of the boarding line. Get some funny looks putting my helmet into the overhead bins. Smallest plane I've personally been on (Bombardier (sp?) 900, not really small, but I've always flown on fairly large planes). I literally can't stand up straight in the middle of the aisle. So very very glad to get out when we landed, and it was only a 2:15 trip. Like riding in the backseat of an early 90's econobox. I had reserved a compact car for the week, but the couple right in front of my grabbed the last compact (a Corolla?). So I got upgraded to an Intermediate. Whee, a line of Pontiac G6s and a single Mitsu Galant. Joy. And then at the end was a Dodge Nitro. Now, this thing is seriously ugly, but it's at least AWD, and has a lot of cargo room. So that's my ride for the next few days. I didn't have a hotel booked (at all because I'm sharing a room), but I figured it would be easy to find a room for the night. Wrong. It's like freakin' go to NH season. The fall here is beautiful, and apparently everyone in New England is here for the weekend. Found a place, but had to drive about 40 miles from where I was (heading towards Concord) into MA for the night. Well, I could have stayed at a Holiday Inn in Nashua, which is like 5 miles closer, but it would have been $270 for a smooking room. No friggin' way, I'll sleep in the (large enough) car first. Tomorrow I go meet up with 409industries and his buddy who is also in the class, plus some locals for dinner, then we caravan up to Littleton, NH where we're staying for the school.
Day 0 Since I've got nothing to do today but kill time until the evening, I thought I'd fill in a little background on how I came to rally and my connections to Team O'Neil. Back in late 2001 I was getting frustrated with my old 93 Sentra, and didn't think it was a reliable daily driver anymore (in fact, looking back, this wasn't true, I just felt like I needed a new car after 8 years). I went and test drove a 2002 Sentra SE-R, but it was very disappointing. Looked at the WRX and fell in love. Came close to buying one from Scott Putnam (sputnam on here) when he was at Bloomington Subaru, but ended up buying from a friend of my GF's (now wife) family at Morries Mtka. That was Jan 02, I think. In August, I get an email from Scott looking for someone to crew at the Ojibwe rally for a Group N WRX from some guy coming in from the NE. I figure, I know which end of a wrench to hold, and they just need an extra hand, right? I've seen this rally thing on TV a couple of times, it's kinda interesting. Well, I get to Bemidji, and it turns out they have nobody but me, the driver is Tim O'Neil, and they're expecting to run near the front of the pack... Suddenly I'm Crew Chief for the Air Force Reserve rally team. Eep! Tara (director of operations for Team O'Neil) manages to hunt down a guy (couldn't have been much over 18) who was a mechanic at the local Honda dealership. At least he's had some training as a mechanic. Ine the end, all we need to do is clean the car up and pull off a few busted pieces, Tim kept the car pretty clean that weekend. Took 4th OA, which was quite an accomplishment as there were 2 factory cars from Subaru, 2 from Mitsubishi, and that was also the year that David Higgens (Diggens) was running as a privateer (the next year he got his Mitsubishi ride). I also met Mark Utecht for the first time that weekend, when he came around scrounging for STi control arms, and we sent him packing... We didn't have any, anyhow (not that we were going to tell him that). It wasn't until a couple of years later that I started to get to know Mark and become friends with him. Anyhow, some of you have talked about how "hooked" you were after running a RallyCross. Imagine being dropped in the middle of a rally, in the middle of one of the top teams. It's orders of magnitude more. So, for the last 6 years, I've wanted very little more than to go to Team O'Neil for rally school. Last year, the Max-Attack! championship had a raffle for fundraising. It was for a four day school at Team O'Neil. I sent in a payapl for five tickets, not because of the rally school (I don't win stuff like that, never have, never will, right?), but to support Max-Attack! and it's founders, including Jake Himes. I've talked about Jake before. Jake was younger than me, but he was one of my heros. Jake was the craziest, fastest driver I've ever known, but also a loving, wonderful human being with a passion for his family and his chosen sport. Jake died last summer, just a few weeks after OFR. Jake had been fighting cancer, and it had gone into remission, but came back fairly abruptly, and was diagnosed as terminal. Even now I tear up every time I think of him. Now, I was so convinced I wouldn't win the raffle that I didn't even enter my name. So when, at Sno*Drift this year, Tim himself drew the winner, they had no idea who had won! Amy Springer and I had just gotten off the phone (she was at the banquet) and she didn't even know it was I who had won. Now, I need to get checked out of this hotel, so I'll add more later. Checked out of the hotel, found a target and picked up a few things I didn't bring with. Drove around manchester randomly for a while, now I stopped off for a snack at a Panera, and I think I'll just hang out here for a bit. Just got off the phone with Aaron from DI, and he's waiting for his connecting flight, but it's all on time, so still planning on meeting up for dinner in a few hours. You could be blind and take postcard-worthy photos of this area right now. The trees! Seriously, even in town (not downtown, but in town), you can find 60' pine trees right next to pretty much anything. And not just one or two, but hundreds. The target I stopped in in Bedford looked literally like it was in the middle of a deep forest. And really, it was. The colors are at an absolute peak right now too. There are parts of northern MN that look kinda like this, but nothing so unbroken. Jake was a forester. He'd love the trees here too. A little more about that first weekend crewing for Tim. OFR often has a "roadside" service that's like 5 minutes. Now, Team O'Neil had two cars there (their normal crew was running their own car, which is why they didn't have crew). The other car breaks down before the 5 minute service and needs the truck to come with the trailer and recover the car from where sweep pulled it to. So, I get a 5-gallon can of Sunoco 104 and hop into a truck with Doug Havir's (now the owner of Rally America, back then SCCA ran the series and he was just a competitor) crew. It's pouring rain, with about 10' of visibility, and we're waiting for Doug to come in. Doug is driving CPD1, which was, and probably still is, the most technically advanced rally car in the USA. He's running up at the front. Tim's rather underpowered (by comparison) Group-N car has him back several spots. Umm, well it did. Turns out between the service where we split up and the roadside service, Tim had made up a bunch of spots (Tim is exceptionally good at handling rain and adverse weather). He came into service immediately behind Doug. The problem is, Doug pulled in and stopped, and Tim couldn't see me, so kept going. I ran more than 1/4 mile down that damn dirt road in the pouring rain chasing him. Never caught up to him, as he reached the end of the line of cars and decided he wasn't going to find me and took off. Thankfully, we had overfilled the tank at the previous service (as we didn't realize we were supposed to wait until Martin, Tim's co-driver, had calculated the fuel usage). So he actually had enough to finish the night. Just, iirc. He was a little peeved at me the next time we met until I told him what happened, and then he was like "Oh, you didn't need to run the whole length of service trying to catch me." :roll: Anyhow, he then did thonly damage to the car he had all weekend. He punched a HID lamp ($1k cost back then) into a berm and smashed it. The pod (mounted in place of a stock foglight) looked like a potted plant when he came in.
Day 1 Today started out with a classroom session, basically explaining the concepts behind what we were going to be working on today. It's all good information, but not too exciting to write about. Then we headed out to the skidpad, where the first exercise was to get us used to left foot braking. I've done a little bit, but not a lot, and never got very comfortable with it. Basically what we did was get into second, about 1/2 throttle and turn the wheel 180 deg. If you just do that, the car will just plow straight on the gravel. So we start adding left foot until the car starts to rotate, and then modulate it until you can keep it in a nice, consistant drift. By the time we were done, pretty much everyone could hold that car in a nice drift around the pad indefinately. Next they set up a slalom, and we practiced coming into it, and turning in, left foot braking, straightening the wheel, and holding the brake to maintain rotation until we were lined up for the next cone in the slalom. Not the fastest way through a straight slalom, but the point was to get us used to (and to start to retain muscle memory) using our feet to steer the car. Also, it served as a good lesson for anyone who likes to lift in a corner because the slalom was tight enough to provide prenty of runoff if you lifted and spun. Did that for quite a while, getting better and better at timing the turn in and braking. Then we broke for lunch. After lunch, the slalom had been reset, with a large offset, and some guide cones that acted as a definition of the outside of the road, as well as a visual guide for how far we wanted to rotate. What I learned here is that I really want to steer too much and not brake enough, which leaves me over-rotating and having to couter-steer too much (and then being late for the next turn). I was getting better by the end of the day, but still not quite consistantly there. Last exercise of the day was an avoidance manuver. There was an "obstacle" in the course and the instructor would have you drive at a consistant speed of about 40mph towards it, and at the last second tell you right or left. We did this with locking up the brakes to plow into the gravel, threshold braking, and straight avoidance with no brakes at all. After we'd done this long enough for the lead instructor (who happened to be my in-car also for this exercise), got out of the car and went into the middle of the obstacle. What we would then do was the exact same thing, but instead of having him in the car saying right or left, he'd stand in the road and at the last moment point right or left. Or neither. Caught myself more than once trying to predict which way he was going to point and setting up wrong (I find when trying to brake hard on gravel I twitch the car just a tiny bit sideways), and if I did that the wrong way I'd be a little out of shape for the direction he'd call. Still, he must have had some faith because only the two of us he was instructing were doing this without an instructor in the car. One time I botched the direction and ended up just pitching the whole car sideways to bring it to a halt, stalling the car (and stopping about 1 foot short of the obstacle). The car didn't much like me after that, popping and bucking and running with no power, but it recovered after a short rest and my partner had no problems with it when he took his turn. We then spent about the last 30-45 minutes listening to the technicians talk about what mechanically you need to know to make a rally car work, and how to drive such as to not to break those things. Nothing new to me there, but for a couple of people it seemed like stuff they'd never considered before, so there's clearly value in that part for some folks. Came back, showered, went off to dinner with about 1/2 the class, and now just taking it easy in the hotel. Day 2 is supposed to introduce some more advanced tools (though I've learned an enormous amount already), and 3 & 4 are for honing those skills in a more individually tailored fashion (1/2 or class will be one before the last day, they only took the 2 or 3 day versions, so by Thursday it'll be one student per instructor, and no more sharing cars.
Gotta love airline travel. Definitely will keep an eye on this thread, Team O'Neil is definitely something I want to do on down the road, but its hard to justify the $$ when I still have a LOT of learning to do at rallycross speeds.
lmao... When you got to the part about finding the room in NH I started laughing before I read your next sentence. I'm from CT and lived 3 years in southern Maine and knew exactly what you were about to say. Subscribed.
I'm very jealous! How far do you need to sign up in advance for team o'neil? I'm seriously thinking of doing this next year
I think I had to book 3 or 4 months ahead? It's been long enough ago that I've forgotten. As Katnip said over at dirtyimpreza, they sometimes open classes on short notice though, so if it happened to work out you could get lucky.
Bump for Day one update. Aaron, who runs http://www.dirtyimpreza.com is also in the class is writing his blog here: http://www.dirtyimpreza.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6686
