Snow Chaos - 2nd day of rallying, February 4th

Breakfast at 06:30 am. A little early if you ask me, but that’s how it is these days are at the Monte-Carlo event.

Detailed planning as to where Frode & Harald should meet us, and how to facilitate a smooth run (food, petrol, any unforeseen maintenance, etc) was concluded.

We left Parc Fermé as scheduled and turned west of the river and up into the hills. The Ice-car (track review service) had already notified that SR 7 would be without any snow/ice, and spirits were high as the sun peered through the early morning skies.

SR 7 turned out ok, navigation was not an issue – just keeping up the speed was. All left with the pilot….

Then, we headed for SR 8. We knew that could be rather interesting, and we drove through the hills we got the latest news from the Ice-car; they couldn’t drive through because of massive snow….. Well, we just continued up into the hills seeing more snow than rain, and our best guess was a messy regularity. And that’s what we got. As many teams arranged for change of wheels, we just went straight up to SR 8 – ready to head off. A lot of snow. And rain. And temperature above freezing. The result is slush, approx. 10-15 cm of it. And very windy. So, when we were sent off, we thought this could be very interesting and challenging. After maneuvering through the mess for some 1,5 km I lost control of the car for 1-2 secs – and we swirled and hit the plow edge. Had some trouble starting the engine again and lost some time. But we finally managed to pick up speed and time so at the end of the SR we were more or less ok.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcWMGgaB1J8

SR 9 in contrast should be ok, no snow or slippery roads and the road book said that this would be quite straight forward with just a few hairpins. What a misperception. It was super demanding, unforgiving and with a lot of hairpins. After 10 km we felt rather exhausted, but somewhat satisfied. Ok after all.

SR 10 was another run of the SR7. So, it should be ok. And it was until we lost the servo somewhere around 5 km into the stage. We tried to keep up the speed and I ignored any further warnings from the instruments until we crossed the finish line. Then I realized that the water pump was out of service as well…. We called in the service team, and after half an hour the problem was fixed, and we were back in the game. The crucial thing was however to check in at the latest 30 min after our scheduled time – and that we did, after some interesting driving down the hills.

So, even being heavily penalized for our problems/delays, we are still in the game!