The California Rally Series starts brutally with one of the roughest rallies on the ProRally schedule. As an SCCA ProRally competitor, this is a big, two-day race. As a ClubRally competitor like us racing for CRS points, it's two separate rallies. That turns out to be a very good thing.
This was a stock SE-R Spec-V only two and a half months before this race. Two and a half months of all-nighters isn't very good for your concentration. I can hardly remember what happened at the Rim of the World, but looking at the car, I don't think it was all good.
Rim starts at night, so we went crazy with the lights. A giant light pod filled with McCulloch HIDs was mounted on the hood. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to mount it very well. It seemed fine on the street, but once we hit the dirt, the flexy hood, partially gutted to make room for our massive strut towers, was letting the whole pod bounce around. To stop the incessant bouncing, we wrapped a nylon strap around it and tied it to the bumper. That pulled it down, aiming the lights at the ground. We're lucky we didn't start any fires. The HID lights are so bright they hurt, at least when they're aimed 10 feet in front of the car. One of these days when they point down the road, they'll be really useful.
The first pavement stage was frustrating. The suspension was set up for gravel and the altitude was hurting horsepower. When we finally hit the dirt, everything started to work brilliantly--for about one stage. Halfway through the second gravel stage, (officially stage 4), we lost the left front strut, started hearing an ominous clunk from the right front, and started thinking our lack of power might be something more ominous than the altitude.
By the time we reached service, the power loss had developed into a severe misfire, the clunk was sounding serious, and the front suspension was bouncing. We had Steve Mitchell, a local Skyline-driving Nissan engineer, on our service crew that day, and his factory scan tool showed a bad intake temp sensor/airflow meter circuit. Swapping to a spare sensor didn't solve the problem. The clunk was the spherical bearing in our camber plate wearing out; we didn't have a spare. The strut that felt blown had, indeed, spewed oil all over the wheel well. We didn't have a spare strut, either.
Then we forgot to put gas in the car.
With only a quarter tank of gas, we drove conservatively between stages, and simply didn't have enough power to go fast on stages. Stage 5 was a fast, sweeping uphill tarmac stage. With a healthy car, it would have been third and fourth gear. In our condition, it was first and second. By the time we bounced out of the last stage, our rally looked doomed. At 2:30 a.m., when the scores were posted, we were shocked to find ourselves tied for first. In more than 55 minutes of racing, we were tied, down to the second, with Jay Streets in a turbocharged Volvo 760. Jim Gillespie, in a Mazda RX-7, was only three seconds behind. I wish I could say the scores were so close because we're all such brilliantly fast drivers, but the reality is we all had severe, but well-matched problems. Sucking less than everyone else is a sad way to win a rally, but the points count just as much.
With no power, a blown strut, and two worn-out spherical bearings, day two was doomed. We started anyway, hoping attrition might get us into the points. Before the first stage I actually said, "we're probably going to blow a shock through the hood, but I have a spare hood, so let's race." Predictably, the left front shock went through the hood on the third stage.
Between the problems, the SE-R showed huge potential. The handling was very well balanced before everything fell apart, we had enough travel (several inches more than stock), and the power, when all the electrons were going where they belonged, was fantastic. We later learned the intake air temp sensor had nothing to do with it. A broken wire in the injector harness had us running on three cylinders. Funny, that never happened when we had carburetors.
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