WTF is Cyclocross?

For some strange reason I gave cyclocross racing a go this autumn. Cyclocross is very popular in Euroland where eons ago road racers started using it to stay fit during the winter. It's now it's own sport. Cyclocross is kind of like rallying whereby competitors race machines that aren't made for off-road use, off-road. I quite like it.

There is a great series of races in and around Grand Rapids run by kisscross.com. I managed to get out to a few events and so far have had a pretty good time. Today sucked a little due to some pre-winter flu crap I have but it was still a good course. The courses are between 1-2 miles long usually so these are sprint type events where lap counts can be anywhere from 3-8. The general idea is to go hard and try not to throw up.

If you can ride a bike, it's worth coming out on a Sunday and giving it a go. The last event of this season is on November 27th.

December Chill

For many, December is a time for reflecting on the past 12 months, spending quality time with the family in front of the fire and enjoying a finely prepared hot Christmas dinner. I ask myself then, why am I heading out into the Michigan woods to compete in a 7hr adventure race that involves mountain biking, canoeing and running whilst navigating with a map and compass?
The truth is, the 12hr endure mountain bike race at Hanson Hills was the motivation to get out and compete in a multi-sport race, it just so happened that the next one was in December! Biking, canoeing, trekking and navigation aren’t new to me. Long before I held a drivers license this is how I spent my time. I even used to do orienteering as a kid. A driver who can navigate? Imagine the shock and horror of it all. With that said, what with GPS and Smartphones these days it’s been many years since I pulled out a map and compass and I still can’t run to save myself so this should be interesting. Honestly, I have no idea what we are in for and as I roped Paul Fernandez (12hr endure team mate) into this we’re committed to it. He's a co-driver so I'm hoping we don't get lost.
As of today we are on the entry list of 27, 17 of us make up the class we are in and we are eagerly anticipating a racer’s update (supps!) in a couple of weeks. Hopefully that will shed some light on this winter madness.
You can find out more about the event at http://www.infiterrasports.com/events/2011/december-chill/ and follow updates of our team aptly named ‘POR’ here at albarallysport.com

With a few minor modifications (saddle bag with tube, air and multi-tool, a bottle cage and grippy Schwalbe tyres) the bike is ready for winter adventure racing.

12hrs of Hanson Hills

Race weekend arrived all too quickly. For some reason this crazy idea to race our bikes for 12hrs at the Hanson Hills enduro maybe wasn’t a smart one, I thought to myself. I probably wasn’t the only one in team Quattro that was asking himself, “Have I put enough miles in over the last 2 months?” Perhaps I was.
Our departure planning was terrible. Tammy and I arrived in Grayling, MI with the two kiddies around 10pm. Not a smart move. We finally got them settled down and asleep but we had a crappy night’s rest.
Rise and shine at 6:30am to start ‘fueling’ and ‘regular fluid checks’ for the day ahead. A healthy Big Boy breakfast followed by constant water intake got us fired up and by 8am Paul and his friend Joe and I headed over to the race to set up service at the base of the Hanson Hills ski area. There we met the fourth member of the team, Jake who I work with. It was a cloudless day but nippy. The race in principle was fairly straight forward. Starting at 10am we had to race as many laps as possible in 12hrs. The course was mostly tight, twisty single track with the occasionally sand trap where you had to keep your wits about you to avoid the trees that were right on the edge of the trail. They weren’t going to move if you came too close and we hadn’t fitted rollcages to our bikes and the helmets didn’t have HANS posts. There was even a Caution! on one descent.
Paul and Joe had raced this event before so Paul drew the short straw and started first. I was keen to put a night lap in but went second, then Jake then Joe. This proved to be a great starting order. Going into this event, in my mind we were going to do about 12 laps. Jake and I had visited Hanson Hills a couple of months prior and while the race course wasn’t marked out we got a feel for the terrain and it was pretty tough. I was thinking 55mins-1hr laps plus a changeover between riders. Paul set a blistering first lap at 51m 45s, our relay style handover was smooth and I took off on the trail. It started out on two track gravel then changed into hard packed sand and a single track climb. The first 1.5 miles climbed up into the woods and then flattened out and snaked down into a ravine. There was no chance to rest and with tight turns the focus was on maintaining momentum by not braking. Keep the speed, bank the turns and rail the side of the trail.
Don’t look off to the side or those magnetic trees would get you. I was glad I had a new bike. It’s a carbon 29er with lock on the fly suspension forks, very light and super fast on this terrain. I zig-zagged through the woods, the air was a little chilly with the low morning sun. The last climb was a killer; two track gravel with sand at the top, almost designed to zap the last ounce of power you had in your legs. It climbed the back of the ski hill but once up there the traverse through the woods was fast into a tight left and down a rocky chute over a crest and down the ski hill to the finish line 10.5 miles later and another 52mins lap. It felt as though we were flying and it was fun.
Jake was up next and he powered off at the changeover coming back around in another 52mins lap then Joe was up and smoked us all with 48mins. The ‘old’ guy in the team schooled us all. With that inspiration we got into a groove and got used to resting, refueling between laps. Allister helped with service and almost stabbed my tyre with a screwdriver, Ryan chilled out in his car seat, eating mostly, and Isla slept pretty much the whole day in the sun. Happy kids. Happy parents.
The trick with endurance cycling is to remember to drink and eat and while we couldn’t stomach a 3 course meal we scoffed cereal bars, fruit, yoghurt and a bunch of other tasty high calorie snacks. As the day went on we became more familiar with the trail, hitting 25-27mph on the descents and consistently averaging 12mph with each lap which meant we quickly realized that we might actually be able to do more laps than we thought. As I finished my 3rd lap with the Wee Man screaming, “Go Daddy Go!” (by far the coolest part of my day by the way) I could smell the grill from the finish line. Tammy had returned after taking the kids for a nap at the hotel and the burgers and brats were grilling away. It was a cool atmosphere hanging out watching the other racers and just talking crap whilst eating and waiting. We even had time to visit the play park and play on swings, a rather odd scenario mid race.
As the sun went down the temperatures dropped from the mid 60’s into the 40-50’s. We fired up the generator and floodlights then we started setting up the lights on helmets and handlebars. The rules state that you need to have lights on the bike from 7pm onwards and a flashing red light at the rear. I lost mine somewhere in the woods. It just exploded and fell off. That’s the story I’m sticking to. Joe finished his 3 lap, and Paul headed out on lap 13. We all got a little anxious when the hour passed and he wasn’t back. Anything could happen out there in the pitch black. Thankfully he made it back flying through the finish line and I headed out for lap 14. It was cold by this time so I just wanted to get around and make it back. Food, warmth and sleep are great physical and mental motivators. There were a few stragglers out there that could obviously see the lights coming up behind them and they jumped off the side of the trail to let me by.
There was some wildlife out there to so my mind started playing tricks on me imagining flying around a corner into a deer or something big and furry. Suddenly a black cat shot across the trail, yikes. It must have been a sign that the stinking hill at the end was coming up. It kicked my arse but once at the top it was a cruise to the finish and we had done it. 14 laps or 148 miles in 12hrs 13mins 15seconds. Brilliant.

Now, a little perspective. The top 2 person team did 15 laps in less time than we did. The winner of the solo 24hr race did 20 laps.

We were still pretty happy with ourselves but clearly a loooong way to go in this game.

July 2011 already?

It's been a long time since we sat in the rally car. Due to a very busy year, our rallying has been on hold. During the second half of the year we plan to get back into the garage and prepare the car for the 2012 season so stay posted!

Alba Rallysport is a twit. Yes, we are on twitter and you can follow our updates on car prep, up and coming rallies, driving madness and the odd biking outing thrown in for training.

We havent been completely car free this year and did have the chance to test drive a Tesla Roadster which completely changed my perception of EV's. That thing is a missle. The torque and overall performance is incredible. Now, I just need a spare $150,000...

LSPR 2010

With LSPR off the national calendar and a switch to a single day rather than the usual two day event there were rumours that it wouldn't draw enough interest to go ahead. How wrong the skeptics were. With 40 entries, national competitors filling the top ten and the final round of MaxAttack! the event was arguably the most exciting regional event of the 2010 season.
We started out on Thursday morning from Grand Rapids to head north into Michigan’s UP. John Atsma isn’t new to co-driving but this was the first time we had paired up in the WRX so we planned to take things easy. With AlbaRallysport expecting their second junior crew member in the spring Tammy was out of action and somewhat happy to relax at home after a week of business travel.
Arriving in good time on Thursday evening in the college town of Houghton we were up and out on Friday morning to unload the rally car, give it the once over, head up to registration then to scrutineering. That sounded all very straight forward until we identified an electrical glitch that took a couple of hours of noodling to rectify. Thanks to Greg Mankin who was servicing for the 555 Sierra Motorsports team without whom, we wouldn’t of had lights.
Tech was a breeze and back at the motel we met up with Graham Evans who had arrived with a truck load of new DMack Grippa rally tyres. We were eager to give them a go so in true WRC fashion had 8 installed on the BRAID Acropolis wheels right there in the car park. Late in the afternoon we headed up to the local practice stage where we took a few laps, loose, rocky gravel just to test our stage note rhythm and check all the various settings and systems on the car. All good although there was some knocking from the rear which we later diagnosed as the struts, nothing serious.
Friday night we headed along to the Pilgrim steakhouse. Brilliant.
We woke to another crisp clear morning on Saturday and carried out a few more checks on the car, again, nothing major but we did remove the footrest to give John more legroom. We setup the in-car video cam, checked tyre pressures and left for Parc Expose which drew a number of locals eager to see some rally action. We set off 14th on the road SS1 and 2 a repeat quarry stage where John got up to speed pretty quickly on the notes with us driving at 80-90% rather than the 70% during shakedown the night before. Being so close to town these are popular spectator stages so we kept it neat and tidy preferring to look boring than go off before the real forest stages began. Sorry guys!
The first true stage was Herman, renowned for being a car killer and sure enough the first pass through claimed few victims. This is a great stage and although our times weren’t so competitive, sitting just within the first half of the field, we really enjoyed the twisty technical road, zero damage was a bonus. I’m really looking forward to Herman again next year.
After service in L’Anse we headed out onto SS4 Menge which was a sandy stage, very different from the hard packed wet road just completed. This started out as a wider, open road that favoured the higher horsepower cars but it tightened up towards the end which almost caught us out as we clipped a bank. Funnily enough on the same corner our West MI rally friends did same thing in the XR8. Perhaps there was a magnetic rock in there somewhere…
SS5 we headed back to Herman and again, with thoughts of ending the rally due to the various ‘off stories’ we took it easy but improved our speed taking over 20 seconds off the previous time and we managed to make up a couple of spots overall.
Passmore, SS6, was one stage I had really been looking forward to on the run up to this event. The last time I competed at LSPR was in 2007 in a Golf Gti and I recalled the long fast sections of this 17 mile stage and just not having the power (or balls) to go fast enough. Now, in the WRX it was a different story and wow, what an amazing stage. With an average speed over 65mph we were in triple digits more than once. Absolutely fantastic. It’s very hard to put into words the feeling of flying through the woods at that speed and I’m glad we got to run this stage twice. Surprisingly we were only a few seconds down on the second pass and that was run in the dark.
SS7 FarPoint was just the opposite of the previous stage in that it was extremely dusty and with such terrible visibility it made for really nerve racking driving. Later we were surprised to learn, despite the conditions we achieved our best overall position up to that point! Perhaps all those years skiing in Scottish blizzards paid off. Onto SS8 and Bob Lake which is where we had the incident. Everything had been going smoothly, perhaps too smoothly and as we came into a tight section of the stage I misheard a note that called for a right turn to tighten. We carried too much speed into the turn and with a tree on the outside had to make the quick decision to either clip it with the rear corner of the car or switch directions and stuff it into the ditch. Well, I chose to avoid the tree and go offroad. Amazingly we found 1st gear, kept the momentum going, jumped over a few clumps of dirt/rocks/stumps, hung a right around the tree and jumped back onto the stage Dukes of Hazzard style. Regardless, this was our best stage result with a 9th place overall. Yeee haaa!
Arriving at service we were eager for the crew to give the car a thorough check. All fine underneath, tyres still looked good, brakes were warped but still in one piece. Two more stages to go, hold on!
SS9 we tackled Passmore again. 105+mph….WOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOO!
The final stage was Far Point 2 a 12 mile sprint to the finish. With a clear lead in the PGT class and sitting in 12th overall we weren’t going to give up the fight even though I usually back off towards the end of a rally. This time we had a 2 minute dust window (usually 1min gaps between cars) and boy did we make use of it as we pushed right to the finish stealing 11th place from Matt and Andrew Bushore who gave us one hell of a battle in a 25 year old G2 VW no less, an impressive drive by them.
I love LSPR. To me it’s the rally of rallies here in the US and whether it’s the time of year, the beautiful scenery or incredible roads it somehow reminds me of watching the RAC as a kid.

A huge thanks to our partners Team Illuminata Motorsport, rcmvinyl.com and our crew Paul Eddleston, Brian Burroughs and of course co-driver John Atsma.

Got in. Got out. Brought home prizes.

With a multi-national crack team of 3 we jumped the border into Canada and headed to Catchacoma for a short single day rally. With 2 pass recce on a wide, fast sweeping 8km road, what's not to like? We had a driver as a crew guy, a first timer in the silly seat and I hadn't been on gravel for 8 months. It could have gone terribly wrong. Surprisingly we maintained stage times in the 5m 20s range all day moving from a start position of 9th up into 4th and bringing home the PGT victory. Sufficed to say we were fair chuffed.
GCFR is a great wee event on a fun road organised by long time enthusiasts who have what it takes to execute a safe and reliable rally. I highly recommend it.

The video tells the rest of the story...



Photos by Keith Hamilton and Bruce. Video by Alba Rallysport.

Back to Canada!

3 years ago we headed over to Ontario with a Gp2 Gti to compete in a short rally called Galway Cavendish. That was our first stage rally together and clearly we were both hooked. It's such a great wee event that we're making the tow back there next month, this time with slightly faster machinery and 2 extra driven wheels. The stage is a wonderfully smooth road, wide with fast sweeping corners and a couple of nice jumps. Hopefully photographer Andrew Harvey will catch us in action again as he did in 2007...