Photo by Tim McKinney
For the fifth time in a minute, a wall of mud crashes into the car, turning every window solid brown. With the wipers on high, we only cover about 10 feet before we get the next mud-smeared glimpse of the road ahead. Yup, still raining.
Tugging the windshield squirter stalk and shifting take the same hand, so things get frantic for a minute, but the view ahead is worth it. Seeing where we're going is a privilege we've earned with three solid hours of idling with the defroster on while rally officials tried to determine which stage roads could still be run in this muck.
With no air conditioner to dry the interior air, humidity control becomes an art. Go out in the rain in your driving suit, you'll get wet, and bring that wetness back into the car where it will immediately leap onto the windshield.
This makes it difficult to water the lilies between stages. The rally driver's urge to urinate in the great wide open is so primal, it's tempting to label it an evolutionary straggler from our nomadic forefathers. I prefer to think of it as motive meets opportunity meets Gatorade. You can't help the pangs of hunger watching a juicy steak ripen over an open flame any more than you can stand in front of a toilet and decide to hold your peace for the next half hour of pounding, waterbar-jumping, six-point-harness-wearing rally stage. And when you can pee on a bush, most of California is a toilet. Our strict humidity control doctrine, therefore, dictates that these mandatory out-of-car excursions happen only during the occasional lulls in the pounding sideways rain.
The doctrine has worked so far, along with the fortuitous smearing of the windshield with Rain-X Anti-Fog a few hours before blue skies turned grey. But the Anti-Fog doesn't completely prevent fogging, it merely raises the windshield's humidity tolerance. Like a racing slick, though, the increased performance is accompanied by a sharper edge when grip, or in our case, clarity, gives way.
Unbeknownst to us, a 2-inch rock has collided with the bottom of the car with sufficient force to tear the floor open and spend the rest of the rally in the relative dry of our interior. Unfortunately, it forgot to close the door behind it. Each time we pound through a foot-deep puddle at 50 mph, a thick, brown geyser of liquid California erupts under my co-driver Amar's seat. A few minor tears, none bigger than a quarter inch, have opened up in the floor under my seat, letting in mudflows of their own. Before long the floorboards look like the bottom of a honey pot after a NASCAR race. Mud is sloshing around the floors, crashing up against the center tunnel over wiring harnesses and fuel lines like a thick, brown reef break. Under braking, it sloshes up the firewall, around my shoes, and soaks into my socks.
It also evaporates. And every single molecule of water vapor, apparently, is carrying an invitation for a precisely timed reunion on my windshield. Without warning, the windshield suddenly turns white. It's not the quick, encroaching fog that grows in from the edges, or spreads out from a particularly humid defroster vent, it's instant white at all points simultaneously. I try to remember where the road went. I consider, briefly, driving strictly by the notes.
"Left 3 short into right... 4?" Amar's voice trails off as he looks up to check the road against his notes only to see the streaks of my sloppy Anti-Fog application defined in a relief of water droplets.
We're still moving, so I turn the wheel left and hope. The car stops suddenly, but without violence and without falling off a cliff.
"Find a rag, or a towel or something!" I shout, knowing full well there's no such thing in the car.
"Here!" Amar says, handing me a Hyundai Rally Team USA baseball cap. "Oh." I had been wearing the Hyundai colors earlier in the day as a tribute, kind of a rally driver's black arm band for the reigning champion team rendered asunder by the flailing South Korean economy. Then I throw it in the back and put on my helmet.
I can only reach the top half of the windshield with the hat, and it does little more than smear the water, but it's enough to show me the red and white Toyota parked two carlengths ahead of us. Its hindquarters are undamaged, so apparently we didn't hit it.
We still can't see well enough to drive, but suddenly, I realize the last year and a half of laziness has paid off. Until yesterday morning, I had never put it on a scale, so when the corner weight scales used to check the strictly controlled Production Class cars appeared during the tech inspection, I took the opportunity to park on them. A stock SE-R Spec-V weighs about 2,750 pounds, but I've stripped this car to the bone. The scale revealed that my car now weighs 2,918 pounds. Crap.
This set my mind off on a weight-saving mission, planning a carbon-fiber hood, the loss of the rear bumper, and most profound, replacing the front power windows, which, thanks to my laziness, still work, with more Lexan.
Suddenly, that seems like a bad idea. With a sinlge stroke, I push both front windows down. They scratch down their mud-crusted tracks with a spine liquefying nails-on-a-chalkboard sound, but they work, revealing a clear view of the Focus we just passed passing us back. We drive back onto the road, looking mostly out the side window while frantically waving the Hyundai hat at the windshield.
The airflow starts to clear the windshield and before long we're looking at Ford tailgate again. Thanks to power windows, we finish the day first in Group 5 and second fastest of the two-wheel-drive cars. The power windows will stay.
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